The turmoil of 2020 was a canvas for Derek Fordjour’s provocative multidisciplinary art. An alumnus of Hunter College’s MFA program, Fordjour had a breakthrough year with two critically acclaimed exhibitions. The first, aptly titled “Shelter,” was shown at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, his first solo museum exhibition. It featured a corrugated tin shack that viewers walked through to view his work. The other was a triptych of Black mourning titled “Self Must Die” at the Petzel Gallery in Manhattan.
On Fordjour’s canvases, jubilant public spectacles like marching bands and athletic contests are transformed from mere physical performances into surveys of emotional complexity. A first-generation Ghanaian-American from Memphis, Fordjour explores the violence perpetuated on Black bodies and the all-too familiar public scenes of Black death and suffering. His work is multi-layered — each canvas is built with successive layers of cardboard, newspaper, charcoal and paint — and captures the eye in a dazzling spectrum of color and emotion. As The New York Times noted in a recent profile, Fordjour’s work is a careful balancing act “between anguish and transcendence.” On this episode of the CUNYcast, Fordjour talks with Joe Tirella about his work, his life and his breakout year.
A transcript of this podcast is below.
Episode Transcript
Joe Tirella: Derek Fordjour, thank you for joining me on the CUNYcast. And I want to begin by talking about the breakthrough year you’re coming off. You had two major shows in 2020, including your first solo museum exhibition in St. Louis, and your first show at the Petzel Gallery here in New York, and it all happened against the backdrop of the extraordinary year we all went through. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that confluence was like for you?
Derek Fordjour: Well, number one, thank you for acknowledging that. It has been an exceptional year for all of us. And I think, you know, it’s always a great day to wake up as an artist, but I think in a year like this, it’s almost an honor to be tasked with amplifying my own reaction and my own expression in this time, you know, for for the rest of us, for humanity. And that’s probably a lofty ambition, but that’s kind of how I see it. So I think when I look to art of the past, I’m so excited to see artists that worked around World War II, or during Vietnam, or during the Spanish influenza and the paintings that were made and the literature. So hopefully, along with the voices of many other artists, the work I’ve made this year, at some point can inform, you know, future civilizations.
JT: And there are many layers to your paintings, layers of material and textures, as well as layers of meaning. I was wondering if you could describe your process a bit and why you choose to use materials like cardboard and charcoal and newspaper and the rest?
DF: Yeah, that’s a great question, Joe, and I think we’re getting a chance to talk about layering. I think it’s a big part of my work. I think, you know, for me, I kind of knew when I arrived at something I was comfortable with when form and content converged. And I think my layering process is a very good example of that. I was first attracted to the idea of a kind of weathered surface when I traveled to Ghana, where my parents were from, and I saw these homes that had been painted so many times over, you can sometimes see evidence of the layers underneath, or there were near matches that created these very interesting juxtapositions. When I also thought about that experience,
