Ivan Forde

Ivan Forde (b. 1990 Georgetown, Guyana) is a Harlem based artist working across painting, photography, printmaking, collage, sound performance, video and installation. The artist performs for the camera often outdoors or in the studio, framing himself as protagonist, antagonist, and chimerical human/animal hybrids navigating the antique structures of epic poetry to redefine notions of migration, memory, homeland, and identity. Forde’s non-linear analysis of classic poetry about the origin of nature, the ocean, human culture, life and death, opens the possibility of reformed archetypes, alternative endings, and new beginnings. By crafting his new (visual) epics, often depicted in shades of blue cyanotype, Forde intertwines the personal and the global to offer a transformative view of prevailing narrative structures that unite us across cultures, geographies and time. Powerhouse Arts welcomed Forde as the first to pilot an artist residency in the Print Shop in 2023-24. He has also participated in residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, Lower East Side Printshop, Pioneer Works, Civitella Ranieri, Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, and was awarded the 2020 Emerging Artist Award by Baxter Street Camera Club. Forde mounted his debut solo exhibition in Tokyo, Japan in November 2023, and participated in a three person show at Tiwani contemporary’s cork street London gallery in January 2024. Ivan’s work was included in “Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures” at the Smithsonian National African American Museum Of History And Culture 2023-24. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Studio Museum In Harlem, Syracuse University Art Museum, 7G, and the Escalette Collection at Chapman University.