Performative and All-encompassing: David-Jeremiah: The Fire This Time

One of the profound joys of being a curator (and an arts writer) is discovering the work of an artist and, over the course of years, witnessing and supporting the development of their unique and uncompromising creative vision. For Christopher Blay, Director of Public Programs at the National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and former Chief Curator of the Houston Museum of African American Culture, meeting Dallas-based artist David-Jeremiah and experiencing, in person, his 10-foot-tall assemblages of black and other polychromatic paintings on shaped wood, hung throughout a vast warehouse space, was indeed life changing, and the beginning of a collaboration.

“The work was pretty all-encompassing and intimidating,” says Blay of that initial studio visit. “There was no sense of standing in front of the work and casually scanning the space they occupy. They go beyond the architecture of any space they’re installed in.”

Blay’s first exhibition at HMAAC in 2020 was an early career survey and solo exhibition of those works, some of which are included in The Fire This Time, on view Aug. 16-Nov. 2, 2025, at The Modern Museum of Fort Worth. Curated by Blay, the exhibition comprises four sets of seven paintings, the first three of which are in monochromatic black. “The last set of seven works in the show with color elements were all made in 2024 and have never been exhibited,” says Blay. Ten of David-Jeremiah’s earlier paintings will be installed in two circular arrangements in the galleries and will be the first time they have been exhibited as David-Jeremiah intended the works to be experienced.

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David Jeremiah, The Fire This Time, on view Aug. 16-Nov. 2, 2025 at The Modern Museum of Fort Worth, installation image courtesy of the artist and The Modern.

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Curator Christopher Blay, David Jeremiah, The Fire This Time, on view Aug. 16-Nov. 2, 2025 at The Modern Museum of Fort Worth, installation image courtesy of the artist and The Modern.

 

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David Jeremiah, The Fire This Time, on view Aug. 16-Nov. 2, 2025 at The Modern Museum of Fort Worth,  image courtesy of the artist.

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David Jeremiah, The Fire This Time, on view Aug. 16-Nov. 2, 2025 at The Modern Museum of Fort Worth,  image courtesy of the artist.

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This body of work is inspired by David-Jeremiah’s fascination with the construction, shape, and design of Lamborghini automobile engine hoods and the company’s history of naming some of its models after famous Spanish fighting bulls, including bulls who bested the matador. “It is a design that is intertwined with this ritual of violence,” says Blay. The surfaces of the paintings are mixed media, and their appearance is densely layered, with grooves and striations across the canvas. “It’s a very flat textured application of the paint,” says Blay. “The buildup of the surface varies and increases across each set of paintings, all the way through to the last concluding set of seven paintings.” The paintings in this last set have “flames” emanating from the surfaces, with a final, dramatic fire-red painting that appears to be engulfed in flames.

Pushing these paintings to the edge of conceptualism is David-Jeremiah’s description of the exhibit as “an inverted performance installation.” Over the relatively short span of his career, David-Jeremiah has used his body as artistic material, as in the 21-day endurance test The Lookout, where, within a gallery space-turned-cell block, visitors were invited to don a Ku Klux Klan hood and ink in a tattoo on David-Jeremiah’s left ribcage with a prison pick. In The Lookout, David-Jeremiah is using his body to define a conceptual space. In The Fire This Time, the paintings define that space and are as conceptual as they are physically imposing, and while an undercurrent of violence and power is palpable, there is also a feeling of ritualistic calm. “He’s thinking that instead of the work performing for the audience, the work makes the audience perform for it,” explains Blay. Like The Lookout, The Fire This Time is far from congenial, but without an audience, it is incomplete.

It’s hard not to connect the title of this exhibition to the concluding words of James Baldwin’s 1962 essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” Baldwin writes, “The value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion,” and insists, with all the passion of a preacher’s son, that without the shared commitment by “relatively conscious whites and relatively conscious blacks” to end our country’s “racial nightmare,” a systemic nightmare begat by the legacy of slavery, we face, as a collective, a “cosmic vengeance” as described in the Bible and gospel song:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

No more water, the fire next time! 

With paintings suspended and installed in a round, like figures gathered at a campfire, the “fire” in The Fire This Time is we, the audience, moving into that central space. And as Baldwin wrote in 1962, “Everything now… is in our hands.”

—CHRIS BECKER