This 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 – Nov. 2.
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—accompanied by the artist’s first publication. He has held solo exhibitions in Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, the Hamptons, and Washington DC.
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).
Through narrative, apotheosis, humor, and personification, his work explores the complexities of humanity’s 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—often weaponizing them against one another for sport.
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—the final polychromatic EE (Emma Esse) set of seven paintings that complete the series.
Throughout David-Jeremiah’s 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.
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’s 2024‒25 exhibition I Drive Thee at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. L’Anima, 2023, the final painting in this tondo series, was cremated and exhibited in urns designed after the steering wheel of a Lamborghini Anton.
David-Jeremiah places the mythos of the Lamborghini automobile at the conceptual center of his practice. The artist’s 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.
Kevin Todora/ Courtesy of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Kevin Todora/ Courtesy of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Christopher Blay organized this exhibition.
This exhibition is organized by guest curator Christopher Blay.
“I’ve had the unique opportunity of working with David-Jeremiah previously and on this pivotal exhibition of his work at the Modern. The artist’s ‘inverted-performance installation,’ 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,” Blay said.
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 The Fire This Time, Blay’s recent curatorial work includes the Citywide African American Artist Exhibition (2024) for the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Blay’s work as a visual artist was included in the exhibition Elemental Currents–Material, Memory, and Myth (March 7–June 8, 2025) at Ballroom Marfa, Texas; his public artwork Signals 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 East Rosedale Monument Project, 2024, commissioned by the Fort Worth Public Art Commission, and a solo exhibition, Ritual SpLaVCe, at the Galveston Art Center (2024).
“It 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,” said Chief Curator Andrea Karnes. “The installation on view in The Fire This Time situates larger-than-life figures around campsites to continue the artist’s 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.”
Learn more: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth