![\"Christopher](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Christopher-Blay-Curator66-Press.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThis fall, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is celebrating an emerging artist who also happens to be a neighbor. David-Jeremiah, a multidisciplinary conceptual artist, is from Oak Cliff. His work is featured in David-Jeremiah: The Fire This Time, on view at the Fort Worth Museum through Aug. 16 \u2013 Nov. 2.<\/p>\n
David-Jeremiah, a recipient of the Nasher Sculpture Center Artist Grant and the Red Bull Arts Microgrant in 2020, was the subject of an early-career survey at the Houston Museum of African American Culture in 2022 and a solo exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2024\u2014accompanied by the artist\u2019s first publication. He has held solo exhibitions in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, the Hamptons, and Washington DC.<\/p>\n
His work is included in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art and is represented in the Beth DeWoody Collection (Palm Beach, Florida), the Celine Collection (Bond Street, London and Nanjing, China), and the Cash App Collection (Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and St. Louis).<\/p>\n
Through narrative, apotheosis, humor, and personification, his work explores the complexities of humanity\u2019s perpetual cycles: self-reflection, contradiction, and unbecoming. At the core of his practice is a commitment to examining how we rival the very virtues we claim to uphold\u2014often weaponizing them against one another for sport.<\/p>\n
His approach reimagines engagement with constructs such as transcendence, ritual, agency, and man, rendered through the medium of the Lamborghini. This presentation includes new pieces shown for the first time\u2014the final polychromatic EE (Emma Esse) set of seven paintings that complete the series.<\/p>\n
Throughout David-Jeremiah\u2019s career and in the series featured in this exhibition, fire has been a significant motif. Figuratively, fire is the crucible through which the artist has passed. In the presentation at the Modern, his paintings-as-figures bask in the glow of embers that, conceptually, the viewer creates.<\/p>\n
David-Jeremiah continuously engages with the ritualistic context of fire and flame, including in his I Drive Thee series of tondo paintings. These paintings were recently exhibited as part of the artist\u2019s 2024\u201225 exhibition\u00a0I Drive Thee\u00a0at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.\u00a0L\u2019Anima, 2023, the final painting in this tondo series, was cremated and exhibited in urns designed after the steering wheel of a Lamborghini Anton.<\/p>\n
David-Jeremiah places the mythos of the Lamborghini automobile at the conceptual center of his practice. The artist\u2019s love of Lamborghinis began in childhood and has since emerged as a way of exploring the dichotomy of beauty and violence, in man and in the fighting bulls for which most Lamborghini models are named.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\tKevin Todora\/ Courtesy of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth<\/p>\n
\t\t\tKevin Todora\/ Courtesy of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth<\/p>\n
Christopher Blay organized this exhibition.<\/p>\n
This exhibition is organized by guest curator Christopher Blay.<\/p>\n
“I\u2019ve had the unique opportunity of working with David-Jeremiah previously and on this pivotal exhibition of his work at the Modern. The artist’s \u2018inverted-performance installation,\u2019 as he describes it, has a rich conversation with Conceptualism and Minimalism. It has been a privilege to work with David-Jeremiah, and I can’t wait to share this exhibition with the public,\u201d Blay said.<\/p>\n
Blay has his own Texas connection. The Liberian-born American artist, curator and writer is a Texas Christian University graduate. Blay is currently the Director of Public Programs at the National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. In addition to\u00a0The Fire This Time, Blay\u2019s recent curatorial work includes the\u00a0Citywide African American Artist Exhibition\u00a0(2024) for the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.<\/p>\n
Blay\u2019s work as a visual artist was included in the exhibition\u00a0Elemental Currents\u2013Material, Memory, and Myth\u00a0(March 7\u2013June 8, 2025) at Ballroom Marfa, Texas; his public artwork\u00a0Signals and Satellites to the AncesStars, 2025, is on view at New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, University of Southern Indiana through August. His other recent ventures include the\u00a0East Rosedale Monument Project, 2024, commissioned by the Fort Worth Public Art Commission, and a solo exhibition,\u00a0Ritual SpLaVCe, at the Galveston Art Center (2024).<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has been such a pleasure to work with David-Jeremiah and guest curator Christopher Blay to bring this exceptional body of work to the Modern,\u201d said Chief Curator Andrea Karnes. \u201cThe installation on view in\u00a0The Fire This Time\u00a0situates larger-than-life figures around campsites to continue the artist\u2019s evolving narrative around the complications of being a Black man in America, accounting for its joys and traumas, and extending the conversation to explore the complexities of individuality and humanness.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n