Untold Insight: A solo exhibition by Derrick Rogers
January 6th – February 28th 2025
Reception: Wednesday, January 15th from 6:00-8:00PM
Hybrid Gallery Talk (Zoom & in-person): January 15th, 6:30PM:
Spoke Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by Derrick Rogers entitled, Untold Insight. For his first solo exhibition, Rogers is a showing selection of works, completed in 2023 and 2024, that range from collage, to drawing, to painting. His artworks allow the viewer to experience his unique visual language that draws from his imagination, his art influences and his experiences as a young black artist growing up and living in a major U.S. city.
He shares, “I’m a young black up and coming artist who thrives on creating and is building a legacy with each piece I make. Growing up in Boston everything was the same to me. Someone getting shot, people trying to act a certain way to fit in with others, the only thing that did change was the weather. From graduating from Boston Arts Academy and currently studying at Massart, I use my art to express my emotions when words aren’t enough.”
Rogers’ works highlight and capture contemporary youth culture and he does this by weaving into his artwork his personal experiences with daily life, current events and images from African art history, modern and contemporary art, pop culture, graffiti, illustration, and anime. For example, he combines contemporary art images, historical images and other found images he cuts out from magazines with his signature abstracted black lined drawings and use of color to create his ongoing series of colorful engaging collages on wooden panels. Rogers started this series in 2023. He created his 2024 Untitled work by using markers to draw on a white primed canvas. This work only features his signature drawing technique and this allows the onlooker to fully see the foundation of his visual language.
His 2023 large scale triptych of charcoal drawings, entitled Anonymous Walk-Through, depict the same Lego character with its back to the viewer, looking out at three sites in Boston: The left drawing is of the view from the front porch of Rogers’ home; the middle drawing is of the MBTA’s Orange Line Mass Ave Station; and the right drawing is of the Boston Common. Rogers as kid was an avid Lego builder and the Lego character in these drawings is acting as a stand in for Rogers. These drawings seek to convey what it feels like (for the viewer and for Rogers) to be a small person or invisible in a big world. The 2023 mixed media work, Hide Away, like the charcoal triptych, expresses Rogers emotions. This work, according to him, “shows the emotional interior layers of a person that are often hidden from others.”
The prints of two of his 2024 bold black line and colored shape drawings that depict male figures with grey wings, according to Rogers, represent freedom and hope. He chose to color the angel wings gray to represent “somewhere in the middle from the traditional white wings of angels that have risen/are in heaven and those angels with black wings that often signify fallen angels.” These two drawings are thematically in conversation with his 2024 work entitled, Gluttony. These three works drawn upon Rogers’ knowledge and experience with religion and religious teachings.
Rogers’ artworks are not only a window into his own feelings and experiences, but also offer the viewer insight or a snapshot of some of concerns and observations of urban youth living in very beginnings of the 21st century.
About Derrick Rogers
Derrick lives and works in Dorchester, a neighborhood of the City of Boston, MA. His solo show at Spoke Gallery is the first time he has shown his work in a contemporary art gallery setting. He is currently studying illustration at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (the only state art college in the U.S.) and he is planning to graduate in 2026 with a BFA in Illustration. He graduated from the Boston Arts Academy (the City of Boston’s public high school) in 2022 with a major in Visual Arts and with a GPA of 3.39. Derrick worked at Artists For Humanity from 2018-22 in the organization’s painting studio and 3D studio. From 2021-2022, he was a Anime Club Teacher at the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy Charter Public School. In 2023 Derrick was a participant in Spoke’s Youth summer employment program and in 2024, he was on staff at Spoke as an assistant mentor and studio manager. One of his art influences is the late acclaimed African-American artist Romare Bearden who worked in variety of media, including painting and collage.
Read more about Derrick Rogers solo exhibit here: SPOKE Gallery