Cory Ford

Black Wall Street Gallery proudly presents its debut New York solo exhibition of internationally recognized artist Cory Ford, curated by Dr. Ricco Wright.

As Black Wall Street Gallery celebrates its fourth anniversary, we are excited to invite you to our new multi-level location in Chelsea for the solo exhibition of Cory Ford. We focus on building better relationships primarily between blacks and whites through the means of deepening visual dialogue. We also incorporate the arts and education to bring people together in and for conciliatory discussions, using events and activities that create more opportunities for greater cultural and experiential understanding.

To celebrate our anniversary, we are presenting a solo exhibition of Cory Ford, a self-taught surrealist black artist who works in the medium of figurative painting. His subject matter ranges from iconic faces of contemporary black culture to social problems affecting black communities in this country. For him, surrealism is an objective, not a method. This approach helps to connect not only to the past and present, but also to the future. We are proud to present this artist in our gallery, thus highlighting the presence of black narrative in a predominantly white-centered Chelsea gallery district. By bridging the two narratives of two different Americas, we are able to deconstruct the racially biased past and reconstruct it into a less racist future.

The idea behind Black Wall Street Gallery originated in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a small artistic space in 2018, two years later moving to New York and now expanding to multi-level space in Chelsea. The name comes from the historical concentration of black businesses in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, massacred by local white residents due to hatred and racism on June 1, 1921. The title and the gallery commemorate this dark moment of the past and continue to work toward bridging racial caps in the present so that such a tragedy never happens in the future.

Cory Ford was born and raised in Jersey City, NJ, where he discovered his love for fine art. He is a self-taught artist who is attuned to surrealism and interplay of life. He pictures it all as artwork. In high school, Cory was introduced to more formal techniques of drawing and art history research while attending the Visual and Performing Arts program at New Jersey City University. Ford works in acrylic, often adding paper to create collages. In 2019, Cory Ford won Viewer’s Choice award at Greenpoint Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. More recently, he had a solo exhibition at the Bridge Gallery in Bayonne, NJ, Some of Cory’s greatest inspirations are Earnie Barnes, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Michelangelo. Cory Ford is represented by Black Wall Street Gallery.