The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling is proud to announce its summer exhibition PARADE: Derek Fordjour, an immersive multi-media installation on view July 27, 2017.
PARADE takes visitors on a journey through the sense-memory of childhood and the process of forging an identity, and harkens back to Fordjour’s own curiosities, observations, and obsessions as a child artist growing up in Memphis, Tennessee. At once playful and poignant, disorienting and propulsive, PARADE encapsulates Fordjour’s life in pursuit of art while engaging and inspiring adults and children alike. The exhibition is the culmination of Fordjour’s yearlong artist residency at the Museum and was guest curated by No Longer Empty’s Manon Slome, who coordinated the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum’s 2016-17 AIR selection process with the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance.
The installation begins with a tunnel, supported by lighted archways and reminiscent of the marquees at an amusement park, which guides visitors into the exhibition space. The compositions on display represent a broad swath of Fordjour’s artistic practice. There are new “works on paper,” Fordjour’s term for his signature and highly textured collages of newsprint, and a procession of vignettes, small sculptures, found objects, interventions, and music, which leads to a non-place entered by stooping through an opening in the back of a closet.
The works on view engage Fordjour’s own past—the wheelchairs and copy machines he played with as a child while visiting his father at his medical practice, minor experiments with flotation and buoyancy, wheels and ball bearings—all the curiosity, repurposing, and exploration of childhood.
The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling is located at 898 St. Nicholas Avenue at 155th Street in New York City. Hours are Thursday through Sunday, 10am to 5pm. Admission prices vary. For more information on the Museum, please visit www.sugarhillmuseum.org.
