Derek Fordjour

Derek Fordjour (b. 1974, Memphis, Tennessee) Derek Fordjour is the recipient of the 2025 Gordon Parks Foundation Artist Fellowship, the 2023 St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Spirit of the Dream Award, and previously served as the Alex Katz Chair at Cooper Union. He has received public commissions for the High Line, the NYC AIDS Memorial, MOCA Grand Avenue and the MTA’s Arts & Design program. Fordjour’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times,Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. A monograph of his work will be published by Phaidon in 2027. He is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta Georgia. He also earned a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Harvard University and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. His work is held in the private and public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and The Royal Collection in London among others. He is the founder of Contemporary Arts Memphis. “The process of painting is at once humble and intricate; he covers a canvas or wood board with cardboard tiles, foil and other materials, and wraps it in newspaper (always The Financial Times , for its warm, salmon hue). The process repeats several times, with Mr. Fordjour applying washes of paint, then tearing and carving the accumulating surface as he goes.” —Siddhartha Mitter, “Derek Fordjour, From Anguish to Transcendence,” The New York Times , November 19, 2020