Derek Fordjour’s Love Letter to Future Generations

Derek Fordjour b. 1974, United States Follow +

It may take time, but if you stay in the darkness, your eyes will eventually adjust. Differences in depth and tone emerge, allowing for meaning and recognition. Persevere, and what initially seems like a single shade of night will give way to what writer Toni Morrison might describe as a rainbow. Derek Fordjour’s densely layered, technicolour paintings reward a similarly sustained engagement; their chimerical surfaces shift and shimmer before your eyes. Like the night, they comprise multitudes: ecstasy and anguish, festivity and solemnity, darkness and light.

For his second exhibition with David Kordansky Gallery, Nightsong (13 September–11 October 2025), Fordjour employs the material and metaphorical qualities of night-time to address the erasure and suppression of Black musical artists, the current political climate in the United States, and the power of the voice to transcend even the most trying physical conditions. Recreating the vastness of night within the gallery’s walls, the New York-based artist challenges viewers to see through the darkness to the meaning that awaits on the other side.

TAD: I was just listening to your conversation with Trevor Noah, and you mentioned that the show is about music, and, of course, the exhibition title is Nightsong. So, I was wondering if we could start with music.

DF: The show takes up both parts of the title: ‘night’ and ‘song’. ‘Night’ felt right for a variety of reasons, one being the political climate we are in, which feels like a night-time of sorts, and one that’s not going to end quickly. Then I was thinking about the clear erasure of the contributions of Black musical artists, and how looking at the history of the music industry is a great way to track societal evolutions in race.

My interest in song comes from the concept of one person, one voice—which for me is the basic tenet of democracy—and how the Black voice in particular carries in it a critique of America and its promises. One way, a great way, to think about our collective power is in terms of raising our voices together in community with others.

TAD: What’s your personal relationship to music?

DF: I play music all the time. Very rarely do I make art and it’s silent. So, making art and listening to music have gone hand in hand for as long as I can remember. I also realised, while doing research for the show, that I was situated by birth in Memphis, Tennessee—minutes from Elvis Presley’s Graceland in one direction, Al Green’s church in another, and Beale Street in another.

TAD: I understand there’s a soundscape element to the show.

DF: Yes, we programmed four continuous hours of music, with a variety of genres, from vaudeville to Motown through Philadelphia soul, but it’s not chronological; it’s more of a narrative that continues over the course of the four hours.

TAD: And there’s performance as well. How does that enter into the space?

DF: Well, I worked with Kulapat Yantrasast, an amazing architect, to design an environment that, for the most part, disappears into the darkness. The stars of the show are the paintings and the drawings, so it was a creative challenge to include performance in a way that didn’t dominate, because we’re so attuned to giving attention to live performers.

So, in the spirit of buskers and of dreamscapes, where things have their own internal logic, the performers just appear at certain points during the four hours, without announcement. You receive sound in a variety of ways: from overhead speakers, from someone occasionally walking through with their own speaker, and then there are ensemble performances and individual singers.

I’m also hopeful that the viewers will join in, and there will be a sing-along component. I also worked with a wonderful filmmaker, Kya Lou, on a film that’s designed in relation to the musical score, which includes archival content and a stop animation of me actually creating one of the paintings in the show. The act of building a picture is so private, and I was interested in bringing that into the realm of performance and theatricality.

TAD: Speaking of the solitary nature of creating art, a lot of collaboration seems to have gone into this show, and others in the past. How do you navigate between these two modes of making?

DF: For a long time, the notion of collaboration while making art was just something I couldn’t wrap my mind around. In fact, it was the one place in my life where I was allowed to be as selfish as I needed to be. Eventually, a genuine desire to expand my practice into different media changed that. I start with the idea, and then there are some things that I don’t have proficiency in, so collaboration becomes a great way for me to learn and become a student again. There’s an unknowing that is really exciting to me, and it feeds directly into the energy with which I make a show.

TAD: The show is open only during evening hours. Can you tell me a little bit about that decision? I’m curious about the tension between the cover of darkness and the necessity of light in order to see and engage with the paintings, but also how your medium is itself primarily colour and light.

DF: For one, I really wanted to shift the energy with which you enter and exit the show. Just as we all have a relationship with music, we all have a relationship with the night. Our bodies have a relationship to evening, our biorhythms shift, and our expectations change. I’ve always associated art-going, particularly in Los Angeles, with what’s bright, spacious, airy, and expansive—but going back to the central ideas of the show, and the feelings that I am saddled with at this time, I needed to find a way to address the difficulty of finding beauty and seeing clearly through the challenges of darkness here in this place.

I enjoy that how you get to the show, or how you schedule your visit, will intersect with a different part of your life than is ordinary, and that your energy will be different. I purposely wanted to make a show that wasn’t a concert and wasn’t merely an exhibition—that would be a little difficult to explain, and difficult to document, so that it would all rest in the experience itself. The objects that I create will outlive me; my time with the artwork is actually relatively brief, so while I am alive with the work that I’m making, I want to create as much context and meaning around how those works are experienced and consumed as I can.

TAD: Something that came to mind when I was thinking about darkness in relation to your work was a quote from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon [1977]: ‘You think dark is just one colour, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black . . . It moves and changes from one kind of black to another . . . Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.’

DF: I don’t know if you know this, but Toni Morrison is my favourite writer. Someone gave me Song of Solomon as a gift in my undergraduate years, and it changed my life. On the final page, I just said, ‘Wow, if I could make a painting the way this woman writes a book.’

There are conceptual ideas that drive me, and then there are formal challenges that I set up that allow me to grow creatively each time I make a show. The formal challenge here was to bring the outdoors indoors through artifice, illusion, and compression, and to evoke the vast, expansive cover of night inside a building, which is somewhat ridiculous.

For me, it’s all the possibilities, associations, and provocations that come with handling darkness as material—as artistic, psychological, emotional material—and to try and wrap my arms around it is very similar to what Morrison, I’m sure, was parsing in that quote about how much potential there is, and how many different ways there are of considering this material, which we call darkness, or even blackness, that holds so much colour. There’s a lot of anxiety, but at the heart of the show, I do believe there’s a spirit of optimism.

TAD: You’ve described your work’s layered, built-up materiality as an accumulation of your anxiety about painting.

DF: Layering is central to how I make a painting. Even before I engage with the surface, the substrate has been in progress for at least two or three weeks. What happens on the surface—the drawing, painting, cutting, and collaging—is an event, but it has an embedded history that’s the product of an accumulation of real time and real process that can’t be faked.

Just taking a quick view of my own intersectionality and all the anxiety that it brings, the idea of layering is very satisfying, because the works have this complex structure that makes navigating the surface treacherous—sometimes it’s very difficult; I’m nicked, I bleed. Sometimes it’s smooth and easy, but there’s a lot of unpredictability baked in. This all feels very authentic to me and how I’m put together as a person, how I experience the world, and how I make a show.

TAD: Besides posing critical questions, what do you think it is that art can do, especially in light of our current sociopolitical moment, that other forms of invention or communication cannot?

DF: Art has the power to establish profound connections across cultural differences, across geography, time period, and language, and to find common ground. I’ve taken such inspiration from artists that may have never even entertained my company, but with their work, I’ve communed and found great inspiration. Only art can do that because we pour and invest and transmit our internal psychological and emotional information into forms and materials like linseed oil and pigment that then have their own lives, that have their own ontology and provenance, and that’s tremendous.

When I think of my forebears, Black artists and musicians who made art in treacherous times and left volumes behind, it’s amazing. I am honoured to be able to make art every single day. And what it’s done for me, it will do for others, and will continue to do for those that come next, that I’ll never see or know. In that way, art’s like a love letter written to future generations. —[O]

Derek Fordjour: Nightsong is on view at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles from 13 September to 11 October 2025..

Main image: Derek Fordjour,
Boy Band Breakup: The Fall of Ascension (2025) (detail).
Acrylic, charcoal, cardboard, oil pastel, and foil on newspaper mounted on canvas. 157.5 x 259.1 cm. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Daniel Greer.