Black Herman’s Secrets of Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain—the 1938 autobiography of the African-American magician Black Herman—was revolutionary. Herman was born in Virginia in 1889, when racism in the United States was rampant. Yet despite the odds he became a prominent performer, playing for mixed audiences in the North and, with Jim Crow laws still in effect, Black audiences in the South. Inspired by Herman’s story, the Black artist Derek Fordjour meditates on race in the U.S. in a recent series of large paintings and small sculptures. Fordjour’s signature collage canvases here feature performers onstage and backstage, worlds within the world. His surface effect of newsprint, foil, circle cutouts, and paint suggests a mystical suspension of time. —Elena Clavarino