A Conversation with Derek Fordjour, Artist and Founder, Contemporary Arts Memphis | CAM, and Sarah Arison, President, Arison Arts Foundation

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Artist-Endowed Foundation leaders will gather in New York City in September for an in-person event presented by AEFI and hosted by Independent 20th Century art fair reflecting on artists, legacy, and philanthropy.

The program will feature a conversation with Derek Fordjour, artist and founder of Contemporary Arts Memphis | CAM, and Sarah Arison, president, Arison Arts Foundation.

This event is by invitation only.

Derek Fordjour, born in Memphis, Tennessee to Ghanaian parents, is a widely recognized interdisciplinary artist who works in collage, video/film, sculpture, and painting. He is the recipient of the 2025 Gordon Parks Foundation Artist Fellowship, the 2023 St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Spirit of the Dream Award, and previously served as the Alex Katz Chair at Cooper Union. He has received public commissions for the High Line, the NYC AIDS Memorial, MOCA Grand Avenue, and the MTA’s Arts & Design program. Fordjour’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. A monograph of his work will be published by Phaidon in 2027. He is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta Georgia, and earned a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Harvard University and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. His work is held in the private and public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and The Royal Collection in London, among others.

Inspired by his personal experience, Fordjour founded Contemporary Arts Memphis | CAM in 2020 with a goal to expand opportunities for aspiring young artists in his hometown. The program is a four-week, intensive summer fellowship for Memphis area high school students. Fellows receive studios and materials and participate in three weeks of college-level instruction, followed by a week in New York City to visit artists’ studios, art museums and galleries, and university visual art departments, all with an aim to inspire and nurture these future artists as well as to educate them about potential professional pathways in the visual arts. Since its inception, CAM has evolved to offer year-round art education programming, housed in a dedicated facility that opened in 2024.

Sarah Arison is President of Arison Arts Foundation, a private grant making organization that supports emerging artists and the institutions that foster them. She was immersed in the arts from a young age by her grandparents, visionary philanthropists Ted and Lin Arison, who founded Arison Arts Foundation, Young Arts, and the New World Symphony, among their many philanthropic endeavors. Arison is active across a broad cross-section of national arts organizations. She is President of the Board of the Museum of Modern Art, and Chair of the Board of Young Arts; she serves on the boards of MoMA PS1, American Ballet Theatre, The Kitchen, and Aspen Art Museum; she is a trustee of Lincoln Center, New World Symphony, and Serpentine Americas Foundation. Arison has also ventured into film producing, supporting projects that shed light on lesser-known aspects of the arts.

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WITH THANKS TO OUR EVENT SPONSORS