About a year and a half ago, the artist Derek Fordjour picked up a copy of Black Herman’s Secrets Of Magic, Mystery and Legerdemain, a highly fictionalized memoir by the most esteemed Black magician of the early 20th century. “I’m not sure I believed his claims,” Fordjour tells the Guardian, recounting the magician’s improbable tales of traveling the world and outrunning bandits. Black Herman, he had concluded, was not really a good guy: “In my mind, he was a hustler” who convinced Black audiences during the Great Depression that they could cure all with his magic potions, and escape mortal peril by learning his tricks. Despite Black Herman’s grift, however, his success continued to fascinate Fordjour, who had never heard of any other Black magicians.
Fordjour’s latest show, Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain, on view at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles through 7 May, looks back at the history of magic as an elaborate cultural metaphor. “Magicians are people we give permission to deceive us publicly,” he says, unsurprised that in the public imagination, they’re nearly always white. Even pop culture’s current fascination with Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Sorokin – whose claims to fame are their respective abilities to make money appear out of thin air – “further demonstrate how privilege functions”, Fordjour adds, wondering aloud whether any grifter women of color had ever risen to such acclaim. “The more I thought about magic, the more I saw it as a really rich space to talk about privilege, power, deception and strategy.”
