“Experimenting with ways to create more support ended up creating a new kind of surface. Now I react to something in every painting. I never just deal with the whiteness of the canvas. I'm always reacting to an embedded history in the work. There are about ten layers on every surface.”
—Derek FordjourBright, bold, and richly textured, Tandem Blue is a paradigmatic example of Derek Fordjour’s socially engaged collage practice. Dressed in matching hot pink jackets and broad smiles, two majorettes dance in tandem across the canvas, their batons raised over their shoulders in perfect synchronicity. Such figures of sporting prowess are common in Fordjour’s work, which draws on the performative nature of athleticism and the sporting spectacle to explore more complex questions related to the Black experience and the ambiguities surrounding aspiration and exceptionalism in contemporary American culture. What, Fordjour queries, are the terms of success and what might this performative hyper-visibility do to us as psychological subjects?

 

Shelter from the Storm

 

Created in 2018 and building on his earlier Player Portrait series, which adopted the format of trading cards to more directly address the commodification and visibility of Black bodies and the systems through which they are categorised and controlled, Tandem Blue exemplifies Fordjour's more recent investigation into the politics of pagentry and spectacular sporting display for sociopolitical ends. Prominently featured in the artist’s first major institutional exhibition, the critically acclaimed SHELTER hosted by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2020, the work poses urgent questions around Black visibility and vulnerability in american visual culture, and the psychological implications of this for self-determining subjects. Transforming the space of the museum into an immersive, site-specific and sensorial installation interspersed with a selection of paintings and sculptures, the exhibition amplified themes and issues at play in the present work, notably on the experiences of precarity and instability experienced by those who have to perform their exceptionalism in order to survive. Brightly coloured, the refinied and precise movements of the two majorettes in perfect tandem here exemplify the artist's use of pattern and repetition in communicating the power and excellence of these performers, while drawing our attention to the wasy in which the hypervisibility of spectacular sporting bodies is readily commodifed, erasing the more complex lived realities of Black life. While the space was constructed out of sheets of tarpaulin, corrugated metal, and dirt floors, Fordjour also included kinetic elements to replicate the sound of falling rain, heightening the experience of being caught in a storm with little reliable shelter, realities experienced on both physical and metaphorical levels by the millions of vulnerable people across the globe forced into homelessness and patterns of migration. 

 

Thoughtfully layered, the installation replicated something of Fordjour’s own process, its makeshift, textured surfaces also underscoring the difficulties of making art under more precarious conditions. As the artist describes, notions of challenge and struggle are embedded in his process in highly conscious ways whereby working with rough, uneven textures, building up his compositions and tearing them back echoes the lived experiences of being a marginalised person. In this respect, his choice of materials and treatment of them stems not only from his own economic need at the outset of his career, but is deeply emblematic of the struggles faced by the communities he hopes to represent. 

 

As Siddhartha Mitter has succinctly described, for Fordjour 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.’ⁱ Fordjour’s use of collage as a powerful tool for social commentary and consciousness-raising has important art historical precedents, notably in Romare Bearden’s groundbreaking collages of an African American everyday pastoral, and more recently in Mark Bradford’s monumental multimedia compositions. For Bearden, collage was an act of political resistance, symbolising the coming together of community identity in the face of violent oppression and capable of speaking powerful truths to power. Although born slightly too late to be considered an artist of the Harlem Renaissance proper, Bearden continued their legacy, celebrating Black cultural history and finding innovative new ways to challenge dominant ideologies and to forge new narratives from discarded materials. Fordjour has spoken eloquently about the significance of the Harlem Renaissance in helping him situate his work within broader art historical contexts, of providing ‘this alternate canon that really made it clear that I was working out of a rich legacy’, one that Tandem Blue engages with and develops on both cultural and aesthetic terms.

 

The Making of Derek Fordjour: SHELTER

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Fordjour’s work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; and Whitney Museum, New York, and the Royal Collection, amongst others.
• The Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York commissioned Fordjour to create a series of mosaics for Manhattan’s 145th Street subway station which were unveiled in 2018, the same year as the current work’s execution.
• Recently included in the group show Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, Fordjour has been the subject of solo exhibitions with Petzel Gallery in New York and the Pond Society in Shanghai, amongst others. In 2020 the artist was the subject of his first institutional exhibition SHELTER hosted by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, which included the present work. Fordjour's portrait of Professor Sir Godfrey Palmer, OBE, CD was also presented as part of The National Portrait Gallery's Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation. 

 

ⁱ Siddhartha Mitter, ‘Derek Fordjour, From Anguish to Transcendence', The New York Times, 19 November 2020.