DEREK FORDJOUR

In New York, Fordjour’s monumental mural Backbreaker Double—commissioned by High Line Art—is installed along the High Line at West 22nd Street from December 2025 through December 2026, with related bronze figures joining the park’s spring 2026 commissions. His work has appeared in major institutional exhibitions including Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (17 November 2024–17 February 2025), and Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture at SFMOMA, San Francisco (19 October 2024–18 February 2025), as well as exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2027, Phaidon will publish a comprehensive monograph on his practice.

Early life and Career

Born in 1974 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Ghanaian parents, Fordjour grew up in a city shaped by Black musical and cultural histories, an environment that continues to inform his visual language and his use of sound. After an early period at Pratt Institute, he completed a BA at Morehouse College in 2001, followed by a Master’s in Art Education at Harvard University in 2002 and an MFA in painting at Hunter College in 2016.

A formative turn came at Hunter, where Fordjour studied with Nari Ward and refined an approach grounded in found materials, layered surfaces, and sculptural thinking. Through the 2010s, exhibitions at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, helped consolidate his presence, leading to his first solo museum exhibition, SHELTER, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (18 January–19 April 2020).

Works and Methods

Fordjour builds his paintings through an intensive process of layering cardboard, newspaper, and other papers before cutting, sanding, and reworking the surface with acrylic, charcoal, oil pastel, metallic foil, and glitter. The resulting low-relief compositions often gather musicians, athletes, marchers, and performers into tightly choreographed scenes where celebration and exhaustion sit side by side. Visually opulent yet materially modest, the works carry an undercurrent of labour, scarcity, and improvisation in their very construction.

His sculptures and installations draw on a similarly hybrid vocabulary, combining resin, fibreglass, coal, wood, metal, textiles, and LED elements in stage-like assemblages that frequently incorporate multiple heads, busts, or figures arranged on plinths and platforms. These three-dimensional works extend motifs from the paintings into space, turning costumes, instruments, and display structures into sculptural carriers of memory and performance.

Fordjour’s first solo exhibition with David Kordansky Gallery, Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain (Los Angeles, 26 March–7 May 2022), revolved around the historical magician Black Herman as a lens on illusion, race, and showmanship in American culture. The paintings and sculptures in the exhibition make extensive use of curtains, stages, and props to probe how performance both hides and reveals structures of power. In the large painting Progenitor (2022), for example, a magician figure stands before a patterned, curtain-like ground, encircled by assistants and stage devices that emerge from Fordjour’s collaged surface, evoking the intimate drama of a magic act while hinting at asymmetries between star, crew, and crowd. The sculpture Cargo (2022) stacks heads and objects on a vertical armature fashioned from resin, wood, fiberglass, coal, and found medals, suggesting at once a trophy stand and an unstable burden, and underscoring how his sculptural practice links weight, value, and the bodies that bear them.

In Nightsong (David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, 13 September–11 October 2025), Fordjour carried this interest in spectacle into a fully immersive environment. Working with architect Kulapat Yantrasast and WHY studio, he reconfigured the gallery into a darkened, multi-room installation animated by painting, sculpture, film, and live performance. An original four-hour soundtrack and unannounced vocal appearances placed Black musical histories at the centre of the experience, with singers and performers moving through the space as if stepping out of his painted tableaux.

Themes and Context

Fordjour’s work tracks how Black life is staged, watched, and celebrated in public culture. His recurring subjects—athletes, band members, entertainers, congregations, and crowds—show how performance can serve as both communal expression and social burden. Rather than isolating singular heroic figures, he tends to depict ensembles moving through systems of entertainment, discipline, and expectation.

This dynamic is crystallised in his High Line commission Backbreaker Double (2025–26), which depicts two Black marching-band drum majors executing the extreme ‘drum major backbend’ in bright red-and-white uniforms. Installed at an elevated vantage along the park, the work greets a steady flow of passersby, staging the drum majors as emblematic figures whose virtuoso display embodies both the exhilaration of historically Black college marching traditions and the ‘backbreaking’ physical and psychological pressures attached to hyper-visibility.

Fordjour’s practice sits at the intersection of contemporary figurative painting, assemblage, and immersive installation. His use of modest, often recycled materials aligns him with traditions of Black resourcefulness and material invention, while his larger environments extend painting into architecture, choreography, and sound.

Exhibitions and Recognition

Museum projects include:

• SHELTER, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2020)
• NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2023–24)
• Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2024–25)
• Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2024–25)
• Reverberations, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024)

Public commissions include:

• Backbreaker Double, High Line Art, New York (2025–26)
• NYC AIDS Memorial, New York (2018)
• MTA Arts & Design program, New York (2018)
• MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles (2022)

His work is held in the permanent collections of:

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Pérez Art Museum Miami
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
• Brooklyn Museum, New York
• Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
• The Studio Museum in Harlem

Awards and fellowships include:

• Sugar Hill Museum Artist-in-Residence (2016)
• Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program residency (2017)
• Deutsche Bank NYFA Fellowship (2018)
• St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Spirit of the Dream Award (2023)
• Gordon Parks Foundation Artist Fellowship (2025)

Teaching and leadership roles:

• Alex Katz Chair of Painting, The Cooper Union (2020)
• Core critic, Yale University School of Art
• Founder, Contemporary Arts Memphis

Derek Fordjour FAQs

Ocula | 2026