Derek Fordjour: Double Exposure

Derek Fordjour is a2025 Gordon Parks Foundation Art Fellow.

As an image maker, Derek Fordjour routinely mines a vast archive of photographic references as part of his painting practice. For the source images of Double Exposure, he has trained his oeuvre on the photography of Gordon Parks, which serves as a master class in profundity and composition. Given the technical origins of double exposure in photography, wherein two images of the same subject appear within the same frame, the notion of the double exposure becomes the conceptual framework for Fordjour’s project. Reimagining the photographs of Gordon Parks decades after they were made, Fordjour creates a kind of present-day afterimage through his signature painting technique. He extends his inquiry into Parks’s subjects with a new series of intimate charcoal studies executed on original handmade paper. In previous eras, double exposures were believed by some to have captured apparitions from the spiritual realm. Through his focused engagement with Parks’s work, Fordjour aspires to be inspired and informed by the eternal realm of a lifetime of an artistic ancestor, Gordon Parks.

Derek Fordjour was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to Ghanaian parents. He is the recipient of the 2025 Gordon Parks Foundation Art Fellowship, the 2023 St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Spirit of the Dream Award, and the 2022 Alliance for Young Artists & Writers Alumni Achievement Award. He has served as the Alex Katz Chair in Painting at Cooper Union and has been a visiting critic at Yale and Columbia universities. He has received public commissions for High Line Art and MTA’s Arts & Design program in New York City, and MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles. Fordjour’s work is held in notable public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Royal Collection in London. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and other publications. A monograph of his work is forthcoming from Phaidon in 2027. A graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, he earned an M.A. in art education from Harvard and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. In 2021, he founded Contemporary Arts Memphis, a youth-based arts organization in his hometown.