Fordjour portrays the synergetic dynamics of spectacle, sport, and art in NXTHVN fall exhibition.
Housed in NXTHVN’s elegant but modest gallery, Derek Fordjour’s FUMBLE is a retrospective of sorts. But rather than a career overview, FUMBLE revisits themes from a specific exhibition titled The Big Game (2014), which focused on what Fordjour describes as “the allegory of sportsmanship as analogous to artistic pursuit.”
The gallery’s wall text, written by Fordjour, explains: “Both art and sport offer no utility beyond spectatorship; however the significance of their social value is well established.” In a Petzel Gallery post about FUMBLE, they add that “The exhibition considers the irony of missteps, positioning the ‘fumble’ not as a failure, but as an inevitable and defining element of an enduring career.”
Over his enduring career, Fordjour has made images of both men and women in sport. However, the works in FUMBLE exclusively center male athletes. With that caveat in mind, the eight works in FUMBLE—which span from 2019-2026 and include four paintings, three sculptures and a video—do more than revisit The Big Game. Taken as a whole, they provide a retrospective look at some of the key values, explorations, and strategies in Fordjour’s work.
Interestingly, FUMBLE also includes characters and environments that share DNA with Fordjour’s 2022 exhibition Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain at David Kordansky Gallery in New York. That show’s title was taken from the magician Black Herman’s autobiography “Black Herman’s Secrets of Magic, Mystery and Legerdemain.” Legerdemain means sleight of hand, and in that show’s video tour Fordjour reveals that illusion is foundational in his practice and that “believing” resides in both legerdemain and art making.
“The concept of framing Black Herman on a stage where he could essentially ask the question ‘So you believe me?’ That’s really what’s at the core of the whole show: Do you believe me?”....To some extent I’m a magician myself, creating a world. Do you believe at all? Do you believe my point of view, my experience?....I think artists are magicians. I think artists traffic in illusion.”
And while the subject matter in his work varies—he’s currently preparing for a show about Black comedians/comedy—Fordjour’s paintings consistently invite viewers to apprehend what resides between lived reality and art’s illusory qualities. It’s a tension that energizes ongoing themes in his work, many of which are found in FUMBLE.
First, there is his lived reality as the son of Ghanaian immigrants who settled in Memphis, TN (where he was born) and the related allegorical use of collage in his paintings, which he elaborates on this during NXTHVN’s conversation about FUMBLE.
“My mom and dad are from the same tribe, they are Ashanti. So in our house it was very African. We’re eating fufu, we’re eating, you know, kenkey, and then outside, I’m having hot dogs and French fries and there’s a certain kind of collage. My life is a certain kind of collage.”
In the same talk, he shares why he is drawn to “humble materials”: “I also wanted to try and use…things from the supermarket…and have it hold space next to a pristine canvas in a museum. There’s something political about that.” Fordjour’s collaging of those materials in the studio involves covering a canvas or wood board with carboard tiles, foil, and wrapping them in The Financial Times newspaper, often repeating that process. He then applies paint and other materials like oil pastels. The surface is then manipulated with actions like scoring, scraping, and tearing.
Second, Black labor as it intersects with respectability politics is an ongoing theme. In Petzel Gallery’s Instagram reel about Fordjour’s 2023 exhibition SCORE, the artist describes how African and African American people often are the main labor force where they live, “The idea of competition is about the strategy that is required to move through society, gain economically, status seeking.” Two years after SCORE, the artist shared a similar sentiment with friend and comedian Trevor Noah, “a lot of what my work is about is the strategy, the gamesmanship necessary to traverse a troubled space.”
A third motif involves the archive. Fordjour has stated that he thinks about Black artists, entertainers, and other innovators who came before him but weren’t recognized. At the NXTHVN talk he shares: “[I want] you feel the DNA of the archive, feel past histories of certain figures… the subjects are containers for ideas and those archives live in a posture or a certain color palette—maybe I want to you know bake-in notions of vaudeville but in a contemporaneous figure—and I think that is the archive alive.”
A part of Fordjour’s archive, The Big Game—which was exhibited at the Storefront Ten Eyck in New York City while Fordjour was earning his MFA at Hunter College—is enlivened in FUMBLE.
The critical reception for The Big Game was positive in 2014, with Jonathan Goodman writing that “Fordjour articulately demonstrates the dangers inherent with the identification of sports with black people in America,” adding, “There is also embedded the idea of the artist as player, which in today’s art market, is a highly accurate description.”
In his 2014 Huff Post article about The Big Game Peter “Souleo” Wright shares a quote from Fordjour, that highlights the artist’s attention to systemic oppression, race, and sport: “I create [the player portraits] without any individual person in mind and prefer instead to consider them as everyman….For me, these reductions then become about classification, profiling, and the loss of individuation, [which together] evoke a sense of systemic control.”
In addition to The Big Game, two works in FUMBLE also harken back to the sleight of hand and showmanship in Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain (2022). “Ringmaster and Rider” (2019) renders two figures on stage and encircled by bare bulbs in easter egg hues. A tall, lean Black man wears a top hat and a pink suit that is tailored like Black Herman’s in Fordjour’s 2022 painting “Progenitor.” The man leans on a cane made of a strip cut from the Financial Times; but rather than making magic, he stands next to a jockey. Their heads turn in opposite directions and the abstracted architectural elements behind them imply an ornate vaudeville-era theater—one is left with the sense that “Ringmaster and Rider” was a precursor to works in Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain.
“Highstep Fumble” also hints at performance and illusion with an akimbo arch of floating (or falling?) trophies surrounding a man who dons a hat, a contemporary suit, and gives two thumbs up wearing white gloves. Thinking about the archive, white gloves can carry connotations that range from minstrel performers to the solemn work of ushers in Southern Black churches to domestic servants or waiters; simultaneously white gloves also have associations with conservation and museum work and are sometimes worn when handling gilded objects like trophies.
The confident man in “Highstep Fumble” rests one foot on a toppled trophy. The stage is implied through his exaggerated gestures, the uniformly painted backdrop, and the glowing circles that frame the canvas like stage lights. Pages from the Financial Times peek through the painted light blue wash of the floor, revealing stories ranging from an election in France to an article about Omicron to a feature on and large photo of Elon Musk. The artist’s intricate and mesmerizing use of fluorescent oil pastel and textured scoring is front and center in the area above the floor. It is a reminder that an in-person viewing is the only way to fully comprehend Fordjour’s talent for layering and excavating materials to create depth and dimension.
The paintings “Straight Four Swing” (2020) and “Cerulean Pearl Turn” (2026) directly reference the sports of rowing and horse racing. There are no stages or references to entertainment in these works, but the striped uniforms and repeated figures in “Straight Four Swing” illustrate The Big Game ethos of using “reduction” and uniformity to present an “everyman.” Similar to the cane in “Ringmaster and Rider,” the oars are strips from the Financial Times, where printed elements include a crossword puzzle and stock ticker listings. Oil pastel peaks from behind layers of newspaper and paint here as well, but more subtly and to a lesser degree.
“Cerulean Pearl Turn” is a triptych featuring three jockeys on horses. Two horses—one black and one brown—are rendered in a soft, almost naïve painterly style. The third horse is bright red and is patterned with yellow and green oil pastels, similar to the blanket on the black horse. This is the newest work in the show and feels like a bit of a departure from the others in scale, painting style, and composition. However, jockey-as-subject along with the diamond patterns visually and thematically tether them to “Ringmaster and Rider”—the earliest painting in the show—bringing us full circle.
Fordjour once noted that “For me sculpture is sort of poetry if my paintings are prose,” and in the center of the room three small-scale sculptures are clustered like stanzas. “Oligopoly” (2023) is in the middle and features a glittering black hand holding a red ball. The sculpture’s smart placement puts the black hand in conversation with the white gloves in “High Step Fumble” and the red ball mirrors the rowers’ red skull caps in “Cerulean Pearl Turn.”
On one side of “Oligopoly,” a Black cyclist—who has the only clearly defined face in the exhibition—rides a bike with determination in “Kyoto Rider” (2023) and is eloquently rendered in walnut wood, acrylic, rubber, brass, and wax. On the other side, jockey imagery merges with a wooden toy in “Sea Moss Rocker” (2023) where a jockey in blue and green rides atop a gray rocking horse.
Through two curtained doorways in the gallery, visitors then enter an immersive black box room where video documentation of “Arena” (2023) is projected. If Fordjour’s sculptures are poetry, “Arena” is poetry in motion. Originally performed twice daily at Petzel Gallery during SCORE, it is an ensemble piece that features five dancers and a singer/musician.
The video begins with a ringmaster—played by Hannah Mayree—entering and singing the National Anthem in acapella. The soundtrack also includes a mix of original recordings and live interpretations by Mayree of contemporary music, spirituals, standards, and folk songs that parallel the frenetic-to-poignant choreography. The performance’s design is inspired by Fordjour’s paintings: the ringmaster is clad in all white with a vest, jacket, and top hat akin to Black Herman; stripes and harlequin diamonds pattern the dancers’ shirts—all of which visually tethers “Arena” to works in the gallery.
Dances are choreographed by Sidra Bell who shares in a 2023 video interview that she, Fordjour, and their collaborators were “thinking about the body, the Black body” and the “African American Diasporic experience” and how the “athletic body” is in relationship to entertainment and labor.
The choreography and costuming make it apparent that the athletic focus in “Arena” is American Football. The dancers wear slightly padded white pants that stop at the knees, white socks, and white, flat, laced boots—an aesthetic that straddles the functionality needed for contemporary dance and the style of college football pants.
The movements in “Arena” also allude to football, and the artist’s decision to use a dirt floor greatly enriches the performance as the dancers’ pristine white pants become marked with smudges, referencing outdoor sport. Additionally, their footsteps become part of the soundscape as they synchronize scratching at and shuffling the dirt.
Within an intimate space that Bell describes as a “jewel box,” the athleticism of football—which the trainer Les Spelman has described as “creating space, attacking a gap, closing space” —is slowed down and woven in with actions that suggest grief, loss, and collective care. Like so much of Fordjour’s work, football and the arena are allegorical, becoming containers for experiences specific to being Black in America.
In the same video interview Bell explains: “So ‘Arena’ really has several different scenes in a nonlinearity that speak to the different experiences that we feel are seminal: the funeral, the church experience, images of sport, but also love–Black love–and also upending that in the gendered sense, this idea that there are team formations and even the middle passage.”
The playlist resonates with these seminal experiences and, after the National Anthem, it features: “This is America” (Childish Gambino); “Pass me Not”; “Penitentiary”; “Alright (Kendrick Lamar); “Hidee Ho”; “A Song for You”; “Going Home”; and “Otherside.”
After “Otherside” ends, dancers look off into the distance, one of them waving a large white flag to the sound of drums and a boat’s marine horn, a seeming reference to the middle passage Bell mentioned. Lights go dark and the dancers walk upstage as the horn fades. When the lights come up again, the ringmaster and dancers are posed on red-starred steps and hold rods of white light. They then stand, ascend the stairs, and disappear through dark curtained doorways—an action that will then be mirrored by viewers as they exit the black box, traverse the illusory white cube, and re-enter their lived realities.