Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s time to talk about Derek Fordjour (born in 1974), this artist who transforms precariousness into poetry and newspaper into gold. Not the gold of speculators, but that of alchemists, those who understand that true value lies in transformation. In his artistic universe, each layer of material becomes a stratum of meaning, each tear a revelation, each performance a meditation on our shared condition.
Fordjour is not just a painter – he is an architect of vulnerability, a choreographer of uncertainty. In his Bronx studio, he orchestrates a visual symphony where cardboard becomes precious and newspaper becomes sensitive skin. His technique is as complex as a Bach fugue: he accumulates up to ten layers of materials on his canvases, creating an uneven topography that defies the traditional flatness of painting. The Financial Times, with its characteristic salmon tint, becomes his medium of choice – a choice that is not insignificant. This newspaper, bible of global capitalism, finds itself recycled, transformed, subverted to become the substrate for a reflection on value, performance, and precariousness.
Take “SCORE” (2023), his latest exhibition at Petzel Gallery. The title itself is a semantic score with multiple entries: scoring points, keeping count, composing music, scratching a surface. This polysemy resonates with Fordjour’s multidimensional approach. In this exhibition, he creates a complete artistic ecosystem where painting, sculpture, installation, and performance respond to and enrich each other.
The “Wunderkammer” installation is particularly revealing of his thinking. On two levels, it stages a subtle but biting institutional critique. On the upper floor, luxurious display cases present sophisticated sculptures in a hushed and controlled atmosphere. In the basement, performers laboriously operate the mechanisms that animate the dioramas above. This spatial division recalls Marxist theory of infrastructure and superstructure, but Fordjour reinvents it for our age of permanent spectacle.
In “CONfidence MAN” (2023), an elegantly dressed black man holds multicolored balloons. The work plays on the ambiguity of the term “confidence”: trust and con artistry intertwine in a complex dance. The character’s impeccable suit echoes the “zoot suits” of the 1940s, those flamboyant costumes that were both a style statement and an act of cultural resistance. Are the balloons he holds symbols of aspiration or lifesavers? This ambivalence recalls Franz Fanon’s reflections on the masks worn by the colonized, these daily performances of survival and resistance.
Performance is at the heart of Fordjour’s work, not just as a theme but as an existential condition. In “Arena” (2023), he creates a circular performance space with a dirt floor and wooden bleachers. Twice daily, dancers directed by choreographer Sidra Bell execute a score of movements that explores the tensions between individual vulnerability and collective strength. This work echoes Antonin Artaud’s theories on the theater of cruelty, where performance becomes a ritual of transformation.
The music of Hannah Mayree, from the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, accompanies these performances, adding a sonic dimension that anchors the work in a tradition of cultural resistance. The banjo, an instrument of African origin appropriated by white American culture, here reclaims its roots while creating something resolutely contemporary. This is what Stuart Hall would call a moment of cultural articulation, where past and present meet to create new possibilities of meaning.
The athletes who populate his canvases are not simply figures in motion. In “Swimming Lessons” (2023), Fordjour transforms a scene of swimming instruction into a meditation on transmission and survival. Water, an ambivalent element of danger and liberation, becomes a medium of transformation. This work dialogues with Gaston Bachelard’s theories on the material imagination of water, while referencing the complex history of access to public pools in segregated America.
His series on black jockeys is particularly powerful in its way of interweaving history and contemporary allegory. These works recall the golden age of African American jockeys at the end of the 19th century, then their systematic exclusion from American racetracks. In “The Second Factor of Production” (2021), the jockeys are caught in perpetual motion, their silhouettes multiplying as in an Etienne-Jules Marey chronophotograph. This rhythmic repetition evokes the Deleuzian concept of difference and repetition, where each iteration brings a subtle but significant variation.
Fordjour’s creative process is itself a performance of controlled vulnerability. Each layer he adds risks smothering what lies beneath. Each incision he makes threatens the integrity of the surface. This tension between construction and destruction recalls the Japanese concept of kintsugi, where an object’s cracks are highlighted with gold rather than concealed. In Fordjour’s work, the tears and abrasions of the surface become revelations, points of entry to deeper truths.
In “Chorus of Maternal Grief” (2020), he addresses the question of collective mourning through a series of portraits of bereaved mothers, from Mamie Till-Mobley to Tamika Palmer. This work echoes the mourners of Greek tragedy, those women whose public lamentation gave voice to collective pain. But Fordjour goes further: he transforms these figures of pain into icons of resistance and dignity.
Fordjour’s color palettes vibrate with an almost hallucinatory intensity, creating unexpected harmonies that defy traditional chromatic conventions. In “Sonic Boom” (2023), his monumental fresco for MOCA Los Angeles, colors explode like a visual fanfare, transforming the museum’s facade into a celebration of historically black universities’ marching band tradition.
His approach to space is equally innovative. In “SHELTER” (2020), his installation at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, he created an immersive environment made of corrugated metal and packed earth, where the sound of rain was simulated by an ingenious mechanical system. This work transformed the sanitized museum space into a place of controlled precariousness, forcing visitors to physically negotiate with the instability of the ground.
The pedagogical dimension of his work should not be neglected. A professor at Yale School of Art and former holder of the Alex Katz Chair at Cooper Union, Fordjour understands the importance of transmission. His recent project, Contemporary Arts Memphis, aims to create opportunities for young artists from disadvantaged communities. This initiative echoes Joseph Beuys’s reflections on the social role of the artist and on art as a force for social transformation.
Fordjour’s work with puppets, notably in “Fly Away” (2020), adds another dimension to his exploration of performance and control. Collaborating with puppeteer Nick Lehane, he creates shows that question the dynamics of power and autonomy. These performances recall Heinrich von Kleist’s theories on puppet theater, where grace paradoxically arises from the abandonment of conscious control.
His recent exhibition “Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain” (2022) at David Kordansky Gallery continues this reflection on illusion and power. Drawing inspiration from the history of black American magicians like Black Herman, Fordjour explores magic as a metaphor for social privilege: who has the right to deceive in public? Who can suspend their audience’s disbelief? These questions resonate with W.E.B. Du Bois’s analyses of African Americans’ “double consciousness”.
In his most recent installations, Fordjour pushes the exploration of boundaries between real and illusion even further. “Score” integrates live performances that blur the lines between spectator and participant. This approach recalls Bauhaus experiments, where art, performance, and architecture merged to create total experiences. But where the Bauhaus sought modernist utopia, Fordjour embraces the complexity and uncertainty of our time.
Fordjour’s work invites us to fundamentally rethink our relationship to vulnerability. In a world obsessed with appearances of strength and control, he reminds us that our humanity lies precisely in our ability to recognize and embrace our shared fragility. As Edouard Glissant wrote, our relationship to the world passes through the acceptance of our own opacity, our own areas of shadow and uncertainty.
By transforming modest materials into works of dazzling complexity, by choreographing precariousness into a dance of resistance and celebration, Fordjour creates art that is both deeply personal and universally resonant. His works are not windows onto an ideal world, but mirrors that reflect our own image, with all its cracks and beauties. His work reminds us that shared vulnerability can be our greatest strength.
