Adam DelMarcelle bio:

Tragedy has the potential to forge purpose, and Adam DelMarcelle’s journey began during tumultuous times. He had recently lost his brother, Joey, to a Fentanyl overdose, shattering his family and sending him searching for answers and purpose. The trauma of losing his brother sparked many things in him—among them, an intense desire to learn more, do more, to dig deeper into the landscape of American addiction and the exploding overdose epidemic that is intensifying with each passing day. In 2021, 107,000 people died of overdose in the United States. That equates to one death every 5.6 minutes.

Adam began to take aim at the power structures responsible for the current state of the American war on drugs with his work focused on documenting the unseen, giving voice to the countless lost, and above all encouraging his community to ask difficult questions about their own responsibility in the current state of drug use in America. He uses traditional means of revolutionary art action and resistance, including poster bombing communities with screen-printed materials. When police destroyed this work, he turned to large-scale building projections, casting 80-foot-tall images onto the sides of buildings in his hometown. In 2018, he projected one such image onto the headquarters of Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin. To date, Purdue Pharma is responsible for killing over 600,000 people to overdose.

Big Pharma became an area of interest as it would become clear that the many dead and dying began their substance use disorders from prescription medications given to them by their trusted physicians. Medications, such as OxyContin, were marketed as safe, with little or no chance of forming addiction. In many cases, the prescribed substances were responsible for both overdose and the seeking out of drugs like heroin once the individual could no longer afford prescriptions or their physicians cut them off. Through false and skewed marketing techniques, companies like Purdue Pharma were able to get hyper-potent pain medications to the masses. As early as 1996, the practice came to light of crushing these oral medications for recreational use by snorting the resulting powder, a fact that the executives of Purdue Pharma denied and purposely buried from public view. Richard Sackler,1 the head of the privately-owned Purdue Pharma, said at OxyContin’s release, “the launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white…”

The prescriptions did more than bury the competition—they buried 600,000 American bodies, creating generations of loss and suffering. The blizzard of prescriptions started an avalanche of illicit Fentanyl, a cheap and easily produced alternative to OxyContin, that has now entered the bloodstream of the heroin market. The effects of this have forever changed the landscape of drug sale and use worldwide. In 2020 Adam along with partners from Chicago and Barcelona set out to Utilize Augmented Reality as a form of protesting Big Pharma’s role in the exploding number of dead and dying. This research resulted in the creation of the application Mariah. Mariah using Augmented reality transforms the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian wing into a digital protest that challenges the funding that allows a family like the Sackler’s to have their names carved into the marble walls of cultural institutions all over the world. The Met had excepted millions with little regard for how the money was made. The experience tells the story of where the funds came from while simultaneously telling the story of one person that died from the use of oxycontin. The project is now international creating experiences in other institutions that have excepted funds from the Sackler’s and the profits of Purdue Pharma. To date the Sackler family is responsible for the deaths of 600,000 people. Adam’s work blatantly challenges systems of power while simultaneously providing crucial and often invisible information to the public.

Adam DelMarcelle Is committing his life to the betterment of his community through his work as an educator and artist. He travels widely activating communities through outreach, activism, and educating anyone who will listen to the power art possesses to disrupt, resist, and document our human existence. DelMarcelle’s work has been extensively written about and exhibited and is included in several collections across the United States including the Library of Congress, The Cushing Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, Syracuse University, Letterform Archive and many more. He earned a BFA from Pennsylvania College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Art. Currently, he serves as an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Wilson College and lives with his wife, Missy, and son, Joey, in Lebanon, Pennsylvania.