Ivan Forde ’12
Fall Of Man. 2012 (from the Transformation series) 17 x 22 inches, Archival inkjet print, Courtesy of the artist
Transformation is a series of self-portraits representing the reader of Milton’s Paradise Lost that the artist created for his senior project. Fall Of Man appears in the Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures exhibition on view at the Smithsonian National African American Museum of History & Culture in Washington, DC, through March 2024. Ivan Forde ’12 (Literature) works across photography, printmaking, collage, sound performance, and installation.
Working in his dorm room, Ivan Forde ’12 (Literature) was finalizing a digital illustration from a series he created for his senior project that merged literature with his art practice.
The moment he knew Fall of Man was finished “felt like a lightning bolt.” He turned his computer to show his roommate, who promptly grabbed the computer, slammed it shut, and ran away with it, exclaiming the work was “amazing.” Forde hasn’t forgotten those feelings—the jolt felt when it was complete and his roommate’s fervent reaction.
“This is something else. I never made something that can give that reaction to people,” he remembers. “And fast forward a decade later, it’s in the Smithsonian National Museum.”
Fall of Man (2012), a piece from Forde’s Transformation series based on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, is currently on view aspart of the exhibition Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture through August 2024.
As he looks back at the work ten-plus years later, he sees it in a new light.
“Looking at it now, I see it as the keystone to my artistic practice.”
Conduit and Collaborator
Born in Guyana, Forde immigrated to Harlem with his parents when he was ten years old. He’s built a global art practice spanning photography, printmaking, collage, sound performance, and installation, as he “intertwines the personal and the global to offer a transformative view of prevailing narratives that unite us across cultures, geographies, and time.”
He seems himself as a “conduit” or “collaborator,” tapping into classical literature, identity, family, politics, nature, and history to make space for conversation and contemplation.
His work is heavily research driven. For a project called Invocation (2018–2019) Forde explores the history of his grandmother’s village of Buxton, Guyana. Founded in 1840 by a group of formerly enslaved Africans who pooled their money to buy land following emancipation, Buxton’s reputation for courageous and independent residents remains today largely due to its founders’ perseverance over marginalization, sabotage, and collusion imposed by their former owners and the British government. (Read more from the Begin/Again:Marking Black Memories exhibition site.)
The narrative is not only part of Forde’s heritage and identity; it’s also a source of inspiration.
“I’m like a tiny little byproduct of this bigger ecosystem and this bigger history,” he says. “I understand it as a part of my code. And in times of doubt, I call on that. Let me process that code and use it to get to the other side of whatever challenge that I’m facing at the time, whether it’s creatively or in life in general.”
In Forde’s most recent body of work, his cyanotype-based “blueprint paintings,” he uses the“poetic, epic structure of the seascape” to create his own story. They’re on view in a solo show, Ivan Forde: PUTTING ON THE SKY, at Koki Artsin Tokyo through December 2023. His work then appears in a three-person show at Tiwani Contemporary on London. And he’s the inaugural artist-in residence in the new publishing program at PowerhouseArts Printshop in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
When Poetry Became Visual
While Forde was already practicing photography when he came to Purchase, he chose to pursue Literature over a fine art degree to become a better reader.
“Obviously, I could read,” he says, “but I felt like there was something more that was necessary for me to access in terms of communication and being able to process information and to make connections.”
But he engaged with the artistic community on campus through friends, attending exhibition sand performances, and spending time in the dark room.
The merging of literature and fine art happened over time through classes and intensive reading—poetry became visual and photography became poetic.
Participating in colloquium classes where intense conversations coupled with different voices reading poetry aloud shifted his perception.
“The measure of a voice and the weight of a voice really adds to the visuality of what’s being described. This is visual art for me. I’m seeing it now. And how can I use a camera to activate or animate this vision?”
Dreaming Up Verses
Known as “The Library Guy” for all the time he spent in the Purchase library, Forde would often stretch out on a couch to read. Diving deep into Milton, “some of the most impactful verses in the English language,” he recalls nodding off reading Paradise Lost. The words became visual as he napped.
“I would fall into a dream where that world would kind of open up. That’s where the visual aspects of those verses would be animated for me.”
The Transformation series does not illustrate Paradise Lost. Instead, the artist illustrates himself positioned as a reader of the epic poem. In the age before selfies, “to center oneself and to represent yourself in a photograph is a statement in itself,” he says.
“It was about understanding my position as a reader in relation to these texts and visualizing that—visualizing my experience reading it, how it impacted me, howI am transformed by it. I’m still doing that. It’s still going on” he says.
Full Circle
Forde has returned to Purchase as an adjunct instructor in the School of Art+Design. As a Literature major himself, he welcomes all students to take his class.
“If this class description is interesting to you, come on down and let’s read these poems together out loud in a painting department. Then let’s make some art and talk about it and really have this hybridized experience.”
He’s genuinely inspired to see how close-knit and supportive the students are of one another, and feels it sets Purchase apart. They not only critique on the surface, but “go into the deeper levels of how it makes them feel, why it makes them feel that way, what it makes them think of. It’s really sophisticated and super valuable for folks at that point in their lives to feel seen and to feel heard,” he says.
He himself recalls first being drawn to literature through positive interactions with English teachers, who more than any other subject area, always made him “feel seen.” And he credits the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) here as “vital to what I was able to do at Purchase,” he says. “The community that EOP provided students of color was super impactful because whatever was happening, we could always kind of find each other.”
What’s Old is New
Since the Smithsonian exhibition, Forde no longer considers the Transformation series as “old work.” It’s new to those who’ve never experienced it—not unlike reading centuries-old poetry for the first time.
“You can say the same thing for Paradise Lost. This text was 400 years old up until I encountered it. And it was new for me, and it transformed me. And now my work is inherently linked to that.”
Revisiting Transformation also evokes those first encounters with epic literature.
“It represents the impact that poetry can have on someone’s life. And it represents this transformative moment for me,” he explains. “It represents a transformation into me owning or accepting the privilege to be an artist.”
Visit Ivan Forde online to read more and to see the entire Transformation series.