NXTHVN’s Visiting Artist Program is designed to enrich our arts ecosystem by inviting world-class artists to be in dialogue with our fellows, apprentices, and broader New Haven community. The Visiting Artist has a deeper engagement with our organization by spending an extended amount of time at NXTHVN, through multiple visits, to interact with fellows in their studios, lead a workshop of their choosing with our fellows, facilitate a session for our high school apprentices, and give a talk that is open to the public.

NXTHVN is thrilled to announce Derek Fordjour as the 2026 Visiting Artist and the fall exhibiting artist.

From September 23 to November 22, 2026, Derek Fordjour: FUMBLE will be on view in our gallery. A public conversation with Derek Fordjour, featuring MacArthur Fellows Titus Kaphar and Dr. Imani Perry will take place on Sunday, October 4, coinciding with the opening celebration of the exhibition. This program provides a focused discussion on artistic practice, narrative power, and the role of artists in civic life. The discussion will address how artists shape public understanding, how personal and collective histories inform creative work, and how institutions can better support emerging talent. Throughout the fall, Fordjour will also meet with NXTHVN’s current Cohort 08 Fellows and Apprentices to conduct studio visits and facilitate workshops.

FUMBLE revisits the emerging moment of a nascent career: Derek Fordjour’s The Big Game, a 2014 exhibition where the artist first introduced the allegory of sportsmanship as analogous to artistic pursuit. Both art and sport offer no utility beyond spectatorship; however, the significance of their social value is well established. The artist and athlete wholly devote themselves to pursuing mastery, yet both are acutely vulnerable to calamity. FUMBLE considers the irony of unfortunate missteps. Each artwork pays tribute to the lessons espoused by NXTHVN, an institution that empowers emerging and underrepresented artists through the professional development of mentorship, community, strategy and more—all in an effort to withstand challenges. Fordjour posits that recovery from the FUMBLE becomes the defining characteristic of an enduring career.  

ABOUT DEREK FORDJOUR
Derek Fordjour was born in Memphis, Tennessee to Ghanaian parents. 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 the 2022 Alliance for Young Artists & Writers Alumni Achievement Award. He has previously served as the Alex Katz Chair in Painting at Cooper Union, and a Visiting Critic at Yale and Columbia Universities. He has received public commissions for High Line Art and MTA’s Arts & Design program in New York City, and MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles. Fordjour’s work is held in notable public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and The Royal Collection in London among others. His work has been reviewed in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times. A monograph of his work is forthcoming by Phaidon in 2027. He is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, earned a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Harvard University and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. In 2021 he founded Contemporary Arts Memphis, a youth-based arts organization in his hometown.

NXTHVN is thrilled to announce Awilda Sterling-Duprey as the winner of the Visiting Artist Prize. In partnership between NXTHVN and Untitled Art, this prize debuted at the 2023 edition of the Miami Beach art fair, awarding Sterling-Duprey with a $15K stipend and two-month residency as NXTHVN’s 2024 Visiting Artist, as well as the chance to exhibit at the gallery for its fall programming.

From September 28 to November 24, a solo presentation, Awilda Sterling-Duprey: Aesthetics of dis-order, will be on view in NXTHVN’s gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, a public performance featuring her “…blindfolded” work is set to premiere on Saturday, October 26. For this performance, Sterling-Duprey will be in dialogue with local New Haven musicians providing improvisational jazz and bomba acoustics while she allows her body to feel and translate the music into rhythmic bodily movements articulated into bright pastel markings, lines, and textures onto black construction paper. 

Aesthetics of dis-order is the first exhibition to focus on Sterling-Duprey’s exploration of abstraction from the 1970s to present. Included works range from paintings and drawings, to newly recovered archival and ephemeral materials. Highlights in the exhibition include Sterling-Duprey’s 35mm (Kodak Ektachrome E100 Film) slides that present her study of abstraction in the natural and ubiquitous environments of San Juan, along with visual records of her earliest abstract studies created on cardboard. Sterling-Duprey’s exploration of abstraction has resulted in an intuitive and electric corporeal response; most notable in her “…blindfolded” performances. 

ABOUT AWILDA STERLING-DUPREY
Awilda Sterling-Duprey (b. 1947- San Juan, PR) is an experimental, independent, and multidisciplinary artist that works and lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sterling-Duprey’s work explores identity, gender, diaspora, language, and migration, challenging conventional notions of cultural, national, and gendered boundaries. Her work intertwines marginalities of self-representation and resistance, confronting the silencing and invisibilizing of Afro-Caribbean women. Working with multidisciplinarity and feeding from Yoruba Caribbean traditions, Sterling-Duprey transgresses the boundaries between drawing, painting, and performance through a decolonizing practice that challenges conventions in Puerto Rican fine arts traditions.

She is a founding member of Pisotón, the first experimental dance collective in Puerto Rico. Recent group exhibitions include Puerto Rico Negrx, curated by Marina Reyes Franco & María Elena Ortíz, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC), San Juan, PR; no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, curated by Marcela Guerrero, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US; Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US; Cimarronas: artistas negras y afrodescendientes, Museo Casa Escuté, Carolina, PR; Untitled II, Kilometro 0.2, San Juan, PR.

NXTHVN is pleased to announce Mickalene Thomas as the inaugural artist for the Visiting Artist Program. Thomas will be at NXTHVN in the fall with our fellows and apprentices to conduct studio visits, facilitate workshops and have a public talk in conjunction with her exhibition Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space, which she cocurated, and is currently on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. We are thrilled to welcome Mickalene to the NXTHVN!

ABOUT MICKALENE THOMAS
Mickalene Thomas was born and raised in New Jersey and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. One of the most influential artists in the world today, her innovative practice has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Not only do her masterful mixed-media paintings, photographs, films and installations command space, they occupy eloquently while dissecting the intersecting complexities of black and female identity within the Western canon. Outside of her core practice, Thomas is a Tony Awards nominated co-producer, curator, educator and mentor to many emerging artists. While embarking on her own monumental solo shows, she simultaneously curates exhibitions at galleries and museums. Thomas’s work has become an undeniable force within the contemporary art world and an indispensable inspiration to younger generations of artists. In addition to an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art (2018) and a United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow (2015), she has been awarded multiple other prizes and grants, including the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2022); Rema Hort Mann Foundation 25th Anniversary Honoree (2022); Artistic Impact Award, Newark Museum (2022); Glass House 15th Anniversary Artist of the Year (2022); Yale School of Art Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts (2020); Legend in Residence Award, Bronx Museum (2020); Pauli Murray College Associate Fellow at Yale University (2020); Appraisers Association of America, Award for Excellence in the Arts, (2019); Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at Baltimore Museum of Art (2019); Visionary Award, Pioneer Works (2019); She is the founder of the Art is Forward foundation, co-founder of the Pratt>FORWARD ‘Artist in the Market’ incubator for post-graduate students, and serves on the Board of the Trustees for the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1.