DEREK FORDJOUR

Variously described by Fordjour as a “giant music box in the dark,” an “acoustic wilderness,” and “a conjuring,” Nightsong immerses viewers in an atmospheric sensorium whose aesthetic and thematic depictions trace Black musical history as it manifests, evolves, and travels through time and genre. While Fordjour has long drawn on music and theatricality in his two and three-dimensional artworks, Nightsong brings these subjects to exuberant life, as numerous vocalists perform an original, four-hour songcycle, composed exclusively for the exhibition, across a spatial, multi-room nightscape. The interactive, durational experience of the exhibition ensures that no two viewings will be exactly alike.

Upon entering Nightsong, viewers cross into a gradual emulation of nighttime, a temporal state made spatial, in which music takes on material shape and live singers seem to have stepped, wholly animated, from Fordjour’s painted tableaux. As galleries are populated with stages and mezzanines, and rooms give way to forests, architectural elements situated in minimal light, fold in and outdoors into a dream-like state. A wooded thicket harkens back to sites known as “hush harbors,” secret refuges in the woods where enslaved Africans would retreat to gather, sing, and plan escape. In this sense, as in the origin stories of work songs and spirituals, the beginnings of Black vocal music in America are inextricable from life-or-death strategies for survival, a legacy that persists, Fordjour reminds us, even behind the sequined glamour of a stage costume or the exultant joy of a Motown harmony.

Intertwined histories of oppression, labor, expression, and innovation reverberate throughout Nightsong as direct representations—and as visual motifs, including the repetition of rotating discs, patchwork fabrics, colorful globes, and reflective surfaces. A performer pushing a soundcart traverses the gallery in a sonic declaration of personal presence, evoking the slippage between public and private spheres familiar from street processions and block parties. Throughout the space, the accumulative process of collage Fordjour employs in his densely layered paintings expands across a field of visual, sonic, and symbolic accretion. Collage’s foundational ethos of repurposing, or the idea of conjuring something from nothing, takes on an added dimension in the exhibition’s emphasis on performance, in which the act of singing becomes a paradigm of radical resourcefulness. When one has been given nothing else materially to work with, the voice itself emerges, in all its expressive potential, as Fordjour’s vocalists demonstrate. At the same time, the voice, the moment it’s celebrated, lends itself to quick commodification—along with the body from which it issues. When considering the history of music in America, the commodification of Black voices and musicianship—and the potential for exploitation and appropriation that’s never far behind—is as foundational to any national sound as guitars and brass, the blue note and a doo-wop chorus.

In all the ways Nightsong is a paean for Black artistry, so, too, is it an elegy for what’s been lost, stolen, or suppressed by a perpetual night. Near the exhibition’s end, a primordial room with mud-caked walls, rock floor, and photographic portraits invites viewers into a vigil in memory of those who have passed on—relations of the artist alongside celebrated figures—while evoking eternal cycles of life, death, and rebirth. As a corollary to the exhibition’s title, the notion of vesper songs, and their religious function as thresholds between day and night, light and darkness emphasise music’s near-magical capacity to mark time while transcending it, bridging past, present, and future in an act of exchange between singer and listener, artist and viewer, that extends indefinitely.