Derek Fordjour

Hunter College graduate Derek Fordjour was born in 1974 in Memphis, Tennessee, to parents of Ghanaian heritage. He earned a BA at Morehouse College before receiving an MEd in Arts Education at Harvard University. After a circuitous path to art making, Fordjour enrolled in the MFA program at Hunter College, graduating in 2016. While at Hunter he found a mentor and advisor in full-time faculty member Nari Ward, and Fordjour also recognized faculty members Carrie Moyer and Joel Carriero as having guided him to think and work in new ways.  

“It’s a very different experience to go to a public institution,” Fordjour said in an interview with CUNYcast in 2021. “But I would say I am so fortunate to have had that experience because there is a blind side that’s created if you only know private education, and it is more diplomatic and it is more accessible, and you do get, certainly, economic diversity, and that does show up in the classroom. People that come from working class roots or have a desire or need to work or have children or have jobs, that changes the environment. And honestly, I think it’s a lot more practical for how the life of an artist takes form. I mean, it doesn’t happen in isolation, you don’t have all of your needs met, and you go into a room to make work. Most artists have to figure out a way to make art-making the center of their lives. And I think an experience like Hunter is a wonderful testing ground for how you’ll be able to do that.”

Fordjour has had solo exhibitions at the Pond Society, Shanghai; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and Petzel Gallery, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and Whitney Museum. 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. He was recently appointed the Alex Katz Chair at Cooper Union and serves as a Core Critic at the Yale School of Art. He was named the 2016 Sugar Hill Museum Artist-in-Residence and the 2018 Deutsche Bank NYFA Fellow.