The emptiness of outer space incites a surprising kind of yearning in Brittany Nelson. “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” her 2024 show at PATRON Gallery in Chicago, drew on her interests in science-fiction archives, travelogue videos, and early photochemistry techniques—all soundtracked by a heartrending Bonnie Raitt ballad that mines the desire in unrequited love (“I can’t make you love me if you don’t / you can’t make your heart feel something it won’t”).

Nelson’s engagement with the erotics of extraterrestrial subject matter was inspired by an unusual muse: the storied Mars rover, Opportunity. “I call her a lesbian icon,” the artist said, adopting the feminine pronoun that NASA attached to the robot during its 2004–18 service on the Red Planet. “She’s one of the farthest-roaming robots we’ve ever sent off-planet, and she took an insane amount of images,” Nelson told me when I visited her studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “She was on an expedition alone, doing these butch rock experiments while [casting] glances across the landscape, which is an absolute lesbian trope: the longing glance, never to close the distance.”

To lend pathos to Opportunity’s images, Nelson printed composites of them using the bromoil process, an early 20th-century technique that gives photographs a more ethereal, painterly look. Source pictures from NASA “are so amazing but are only shared on science-y, techno-fetishy blogs,” she said, noting that they tend to be treated as data sets more than aesthetic entities. “I wanted to put the romanticism back in the images.”

She also found metaphorical resonance in more personal terms. Recalling her upbringing in a “cultural vacuum” in Montana, Nelson said, “I started thinking about having to reverse-engineer what it was like to be a gay person stuck in a very isolated environment. Then all of these parallels with space exploration and sci-fi became apparent.”

In her studio, secreted within a former military supply base dating back to World War I, Nelson works with a giant Fotar photo enlarger from the 1950s—“we call it Lord Fotar,” she said—that moves along floor tracks to project negatives, allowing for prints of formidable size. (Her largest so far is three by seven feet.) But she also works with other technologies: everything but the signature is me (2023) is a typewriter she programmed to type a single word—Starbear—culled from flirty letters exchanged by sci-fi writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Alice B. Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr.

Nelson’s new work focuses on enormous telescope arrays, started as an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, a Silicon Valley–based nonprofit studying the presence of life and intelligence beyond Earth. Last year, she showed photographs of a telescope array in California in a two-person exhibition (with Joanne Leonard) at Luhring Augustine in New York. For a solo show next year at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, she is making work inspired by one of the world’s largest radio telescopes, at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. “I’m in the middle of it, struggling,” she said of her work in progress. “But I’m personifying the telescope in some way, almost treating it like an ex-girlfriend.”

On the second floor of a building in São Paulo suffused with sounds of the city and fumes from an auto shop below, Aislan Pankararu’s studio teems with reminders of his rural home in the sertão nordestino, Brazil’s northeastern hinterland. Leather hides sent by his father hang from the ceiling beside a bundled mass of dried croá stalks. Large paintings lean against the walls, marked by evocative abstractions and undulating lines that suggest subterranean networks of roots. Dots and plus signs in other works look like energy fields that radiate from nucleic cores (or “cellular universes,” as Pankararu called them during my visit).

Since moving to the city in 2021, Pankararu has maintained a dialogue with his more remote homeland through a practice that pulls from his studies in medicine, references to the flora and fauna of Brazil’s interior, and the charged ritual drawings of his people, the Indigenous Pankararu. (He adopted his surname to proudly acknowledge “an ancestral legacy that must be well cared for,” he said.)

Licensed as a physician after years of study in Brasília, Pankararu returned to his childhood love of drawing while completing his medical residency in 2019. Just a few weeks before the outbreak of Covid-19, he opened an exhibition of drawings at the Hospital Universitário de Brasília, where he worked. By the end of 2021, Pankararu had appeared in 10 more shows, and he has since participated in exhibitions at the Museu Nacional da República in Brasília and Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Last year, he received the prestigious PIPA Prize, which celebrates emerging Brazilian talent.

Pankararu’s subdued color palette evokes northeastern Brazil’s Caatinga biome, where dry shrubs and thorny trees are gestural marks against the sepia tones of sandy earth. The environment is deeply entwined with Pankararu culture. “There is no Pankararu calendar without the Caatinga,” the artist said of his people’s relationship with the seasonal cycles of different plants.

In a series of works titled “Soil” (2024), painted in clay-pigmented acrylic, Pankararu blurs micro- and macroscopic views while evoking cell membranes, wave forms, arboreal growth rings, and topographic maps. In his “Touch” series (2024), white and black dots vibrate over planes that peel from raw linen to reveal a russet-painted ground. Other works like A Redescoberta (The Rediscovery, 2024) burst with energetic colors such as fuchsia, violet, and green—not unlike a landscape springing to life after summer rains.

Pankararu’s technique of painting with clay also alludes to the Toré, a ceremonial dance for which performers’ bodies are covered in emblematic designs. Painting his canvases as he might a dancer’s skin, he evokes a feeling of movement and aligns his work with sacred ritual—but more suggestively than directly, so as to maintain a sense of secrecy essential to Pankararu tradition. “There is a mystery called silence,” he told me, “and I will walk hand in hand with it.”

Faye Wei Wei’s ethereal figurative paintings made a splash as early as 2016, when she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Especially on Instagram, her self-image and romantic visions—full of motifs of hearts, lovers, flowers, bows, and rosaries—introduced a sort of fantasy painter unburdened by fear of external judgment.

Ready for a change after notable shows at Situations in New York and Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna, Wei Wei enrolled last year in the MFA program at Yale. During a recent visit to her studio in New Haven, Connecticut, the floor was covered with book pages and image references, along with a pair of halved baseballs with fluffy guts, a clay model of an imagined city, a doll’s bed, and other found objects and sources of inspiration. “They are not necessarily any messes or obstacles—they are there for me to walk through,” she said of the disarray that doubled as a portal for improvisation and transformation.

In one of her recent paintings, Calcium Stars (severed romanesque ears), from 2024, streams of confetti exude from three floating ears above a figure reclining mischievously, undressed and in an ambiguous state between ecstasy and dread. The ears are loose studies of Romanesque sculptures that, in Wei Wei’s poetic imagination, serve as an invitation for whispered secrets. “I love architectural creatures, forms that exist as spaces rather than just objects,” she said, adding that the ears also reference a scene in Wong Kar-Wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000). “There’s this idea [in the movie] of digging a hole in a tree and whispering secrets into it. I love the motif of hidden messages through storytelling.”

A Telescope Made of Champagne Glass (2024) features a resting figure surrounded by miniature architectural forms made to look like lace floating against a vibrant orange plane. “I was experimenting with texture in this piece, using a sponge,” Wei Wei said. “I think of paint almost like a substance with its own value, like music. It carries deep emotion.”

Expressive brushwork filled with musical energy—lively staccato notes, flowing legato melodies—sweep across many of her paintings. “In music, you have structure, like a sequence or a movement, and I think painting can mirror that,” she said. In A Theatre on the Moon (2024), long, fluid strokes cloud the bell of a trumpet that turns into a sort of tempest, as if excavating the interior space of the instrument while activating its sonic charge on the canvas.

Looking at Wei Wei’s work, one can feel both bewildered and beholden. It envelops you at once in the viewpoint of a performer on an instrument as well as that of an audience member peering at the same performance on stage. In that way, her style evokes a multiverse where painterly gestures, like music, play on emotions that can range from stoic to melodramatic, whimsical to melancholic, and slightly antiquated to refreshingly modern. 

On the eve of Justin Allen’s live reading to celebrate his debut book, Language Arts (2024), published by Wendy’s Subway, we gathered over tea at a boutique café on New York’s Lower East Side. Just a few blocks away, at Performance Space, the writer, artist, and musician would soon recite his poem “140 BPM”—a sonic reenactment of nights spent at Bushwick’s Bossa Nova Civic Club—in a deep, resonant bass, mirroring the frenetic energy of bodies moving to techno. Language Arts manages to capture that energy in a book, merging music, dance, performance, and language to capture the reverberations of sound off walls. All the while, he transforms thunderous lyrics into leftist critiques: “We don’t get paid / until next Friday and / our rent is due / tomorrow.”

Allen grew up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where he began performing after discovering tap and hip-hop dance in his adolescence, and having inherited his father’s diverse music tastes, which spanned Parliament-Funkadelic to Green Day’s Dookie. As a high schooler, he encountered experimental punk bands that pushed his musical boundaries, and found solace in the chaotic fever dreams of the Blood Brothers and in the loose expressive rhythms of Saetia, which draws on jazz.

But it was Allen’s move to York City that would shape his political consciousness. In the city, the artist was immersed in the world of indie sleaze artists like Santigold and M.I.A. He found in their music a framework for critiquing the United States. “It was a weird moment when everyone was scared for different reasons,” he reflected. “Whenever people are scared, interesting things happen in culture.” In Language Arts, these “interesting things” take the form of text filled with sci-fi-inspired scenes, speculative essays, and “Hatnahans”—a language Allen created himself.

Creating a language is no small feat, but for Allen, it was second nature. An aspirational polyglot—having tried his tongue at French and Spanish—he discovered David J. Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention (2015) at the Strand bookstore near Union Square. After studying indigenous African languages like Zulu and Xhosa on YouTube, he began to craft a language of his own. Hatnahans has open vowels, genderless words, and an invented alphabet.

But the ethos of Language Arts is as punk as it is academic. Lyrics and notes from his band, Black Boots, are scattered across fluorescent green pages, infusing the work with the irreverence of club culture. In his opening essay, “Into the City,” Allen presents a manifesto for the imaginary island of Hatnaha, blending urban life and nature in a vision of creative and ecological harmony. It conveys a sense of buoyancy, describing a luscious tropical climate surrounding a vibrant city center unspoiled by infrastructure issues and imperialism. Moving between these climes, at its core Language Arts creates a world as fluid as the languages we speak.

Within Rhea Dillon’s studio cubicle at the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP), the artist and writer talked quietly about preparations for three exhibitions, opening weeks apart over the summer: her ISP group exhibition; a solo show at the Heidelberger Kunstverein; and a booth in the Statements section of Art Basel Switzerland. Famed for Marxist-leaning, theory-rich seminars, the ISP is a clear fit for the 29-year-old artist, who has temporarily transplanted from South London; her work engages a canon of Black and Caribbean historians, novelists, and poets including Kamau Brathwaite, Beverley Bryan, June Jordan, and Sylvia Wynter.

A second-generation British citizen with family in Jamaica, the artist often draws from her correspondence with the Caribbean, and critiques the sociopolitical ceilings inherited with diasporic identity. Sculptures such as Caribbean Ossuary (2022)—included last year in “Tituba, qui pour nous protéger?” (Tituba, who protects us?) at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris—suggest an immigrant’s aspirational longing for Old World luxury. The work presents a mahogany cabinet, echoing one owned by the artist’s grandmother, tipped on its back and seeming to float like a ship across the gallery floor. Within, items from a cut-crystal tea service (for when “the queen came”) hover atop a mirrored backing.

Dillon often produces sculptures like this one, crafting visceral portraits of postcolonial Black experiences from everyday objects, symbols, and language. Reflecting on her work’s territorial politics, Dillon said, “I think about land very physically now—soil, as opposed to geographies or trajectories,” citing American anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones.

Dillon’s 2024 exhibition “An Alterable Terrain” at Tate Britain bridged the body and its diaspora through fauna. She presented a fragmentary Black woman, abstracted in a sparsely arranged constellation of sculptures representative of eyes, mouth, lungs, hands, feet, and reproductive organs. In Swollen, Whole, Broken, Birthed in the Broken; Broken Birthed, Broken, Deficient, Whole—At the Black Womb’s Altar, At the Black Woman’s Tale (2023), dried calabash gourds are mounted on an angled plinth of sapele mahogany; some fractured, some whole, they stand in for womb, breasts, and vagina. Dillon calls out the commodity equivalence slavery drew between human flesh and wood, and underlines the parallel migrations of Black people and plant life.

Complementing her theoretical rigor with “poethics” (per the artist, borrowing poet Joan Retallack’s term), Dillon imbues her artworks with linguistic slippages and nonsensical evasions. Dillon’s writing favors elision and repetition, the latter shaping sections of her libretto for Catgut—The Opera, performed at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2021. Pointing to photographs in her studio, Dillon explained this linguistic approach through a series of drawings central to “Gestural Poetics” at Paul Soto Gallery in Los Angeles last year. Originating when Dillon learned that “spade” was a racial slur, the oil stick drawings repeatedly rehearse the contours of the playing card icon, distorting the derogatory expression into a tree, a shield, or a pair of breasts. Looking over the recurrent symmetries of her drawings, the artist wondered, “Can I extend a definition? Or can I create a new definition through repetition?”

When it’s business as usual in the United Nations General Assembly, debates over international laws and their global impact are coolly waged, their real-time minutes of interest largely to diplomats and reporters. But lately, these summits have gained an unexpected follower in Coumba Samba, an artist who is fascinated by the possibility of so many representatives of different nations gathered in one room. A livestream of these summits in 2024 even constituted a piece unto itself in Samba’s show at Empire, a tiny gallery in an office building located a 20-minute walk from the UN’s New York headquarters.

Within the UN, these emissaries’ words were of great importance, with the potential to impact the world more broadly. At Empire, their statements acted as background noise to the show, titled “Dress Code.” It consisted of little more than several poles, green carpeting, and the phones and speakers that played footage of live UN meetings. Samba procured the poles from construction companies, then painted them with colored bands of irregular sizes referring to national flags. One of them prominently featured red, white, and blue, which Samba said gestured toward “colonial powers,” the flags of so many colonizer nations sharing these hues. “I’m interested in color and power,” Samba said when I met with her in New York.

Samba has exhibited canvases as well as found objects— wooden pallets, discarded radiators—painted in hues that pay homage to highly specific yet sometimes elusive sources. Stripe Blinds (2023), for example, is a broken set of Venetian blinds whose slats were painted lime green, mustard yellow, and gray, the colors of an ensemble Samba’s sister wore during her modeling days. But without these sentimental details, the work can feel cold and impersonal. In converting these stories into the ostensibly universal language of abstraction, all the intimacy is lost.

That’s deliberate. Samba’s interest in the way things get lost in translation derives from her transnational lifestyle. Born in Harlem, she was raised in Senegal for 5 years before her family returned to New York; she now splits her time between that city and various European hubs, including Basel, where, in September, she will show new work at the Kunsthalle. Shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic, she said, has allowed her to observe what she called a “cause-and- effect” phenomenon, referring to trash: The refuse of European nations commonly washes up on the shores of African nations like Senegal.

A 2024 solo show at London’s Arcadia Missa featured a set of wall-mounted radiators that Samba painted in monochromes, so that they resembled the squares and rectangles one might associate with Russian Suprematist painting. The Russian connection was deliberate: An accompanying booklet featured an essay by dealer Mischa Lustin addressing what he called “red gas,” or the petroleum exported from Russia to warm homes around the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in sanctions on oil, Lustin pointed out, and a European energy crisis ensued. Samba’s radiators may have been monochromatic, but they were “not supposed to be complete abstraction,” she said. Instead, they spoke to global supply chains, both material and ideological.

Minne Atairu’s Deshrined Ancestors (2024) is a work of augmented reality, an animated 3D rendering of an ivory bust that oscillates between recognizable features and amorphic forms. Is it alien or human? It’s hard to tell. The virtual sculpture appears smooth and rubberlike. Its primary face has cowrie shells for eyes and ram’s-horn handles on each side of its head. The back of the sculpture features a petite totem of two baby doll heads crowned by a strand of red ribbon and adorned with gilded shells. Bulky gold chains wrap around the figure; mini heads in pink, fuchsia, and blue dangle like charms.

Deshrined Ancestors recently featured in the group exhibition “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” at REDCAT in Los Angeles, an exhibition exploring our evolving relationship with AI. The work is a speculative prototype of a Benin bronze meant to fill the gap left by those works lost and looted. A field recording of ceremonial cries and chants documented in Benin by British anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas between 1909 and 1910 accompanies the online version. Charles Kim’s remix transforms the tribal sounds into a song. In the gallery, there’s an empty podium representing a Benin bronze previously confined by RISD that has since been returned to Nigeria. Atairu troubles the history of stolen Benin bronzes, and echoes calls for repatriation. But rather than simply reiterating critique, she offers a gesture of repair, using AI trained on archives and oral histories, to remedy wounds of colonial violence and erasure.

Born in Benin, Nigeria, Atairu naturally gravitated toward the sacred artifacts that lived there before the 1897 British invasion. Modernism recast ceremonial objects as artworks, and what had belonged to the King of Benin and his people were detained in Western museums for their permanent collections. This stuck with Atairu, who studied art history as an undergraduate at University of Maiduguri, focusing “on various cultural movements in Benin,” pre- and post-colonialization.

The technology part came a little later. The pandemic granted Atairu time to experiment with artmaking in unconventional ways: Given a lack of spatial, financial, and material resources, she began to work with artificial intelligence to develop artworks. Using tools like Midjourney, the artist began generating images of the Yoruba goddess Mami Wata. She works with Blender, converting text into 3D-printed sculptures, as in her 2023 installation at The Shed, To the Hand (2023). Part of “Igùn” (2020–),her series delving into the 17-year interregnum of artistic output under British conquest, To the Hand was also Atairu’s pathway to exploring Benin material culture. After rendering the objects in Blender, she 3D-printed them using PLA filament, a thermoplastic polyester derived from natural sources like cornstarch or sugarcane, then infused with bronze. Surrounding the sculpture were rings of ground terra-cotta representing the walls and deep moats of Benin engineered to protect the kingdom from invaders.

Atairu is well aware of the growing skepticism around AI, especially within communities of color. She noted the racial biases within the system when we spoke. Nevertheless, her practice creates footnotes for creators to address the system’s shortcomings and leaves a trail for future users. She believes in “revealing [issues of racial bias to make] sure that when they are in [our] communities, they don’t traumatize us,” adding that since AI is unlikely to go away, “someone has to do it.”  

You tumble into Cecchi’s from 13th Street. Before you’re even in the door of the restaurant in New York, you’re peering through gauzy half-curtains, as if backstage, about to face the clientele-cum-audience. Inside, a mural echoes your voyage, depicting the lurch off the subway through sweaty depths, the hasty flight toward conditioned air, the host bending over backward to find you a seat. Vampish oil-painted figures parade from the restaurant’s entryway to its depths through toothsome scenes. In the kitchen, a painted chef offers an oyster to a busty brunette. The dining room features a painted circus of limbs and pointed shoes. In the washroom, a couple does each other’s makeup, pouting at a third face that hovers winkingly in the mirror. Black velvet curtains frame a door at the restaurant’s far end, teasing silhouettes of high-heeled nudes that dance table-height along the walls.

Commissioned by maître d’hôtel and Off-Broadway actor turned restaurateur Michael Cecchi-Azzalino for his new haunt on the site of the defunct literary hub Café Loup, artist Jean-Pierre Villafañe’s (b. 1992, Puerto Rico) trio of allegorical murals Into the Night (2023) depicts the seven deadly sins in portraits of cosmopolitan vice. Playing seamlessly into the art deco fixtures that theatrically light the restaurant’s interior, Villafañe’s figures are caryatid statuesque, with sharply sculpted geometries evoking a Bauhaus grotesquery. New York as urban jungle or late-night denizen is Villafañe’s subject, and he renders it as a study in restraint and Dionysian release.

In Villafañe’s universe, as in our own, buildings dictate the flux and flow of life. Place becomes a character in tableaux that borrow perspectival tricks as easily from city streets as from Fra Angelico. This emphasis on architecture is honed by years of study, first at the Savannah College of Art and Design and then at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Growing up in Puerto Rico, his painterly work intersected with the built environment in graffiti throw-ups both condoned and covert, covering apartments, plazas, and abandoned warehouses. In a studio visit, the artist told me he sees traces of his improvisatory street art in the sketches that are the basis for his paintings. His sinuous limbs and rectilinear tendencies threaten to blur bodies with the architectural features that surround them. Tits and ass become spherical studies. Fishnets echo masonry. Contoured cheekbones and arched brows take on the sinewy, structural quality of a buttress.

Figures push at and collapse the spaces that contain them in Villafañe’s hedonic portraits of city life. Recently, the artist has taken to observing the city with a god’s-eye view, with a studio on the 28th floor of 4 World Trade Center, where he is an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects. In paintings black, white, and burnt sienna all over, Villafañe’s characters rebel against Puritanical efficiency and its “compartmentalized timetables of desire,” to borrow his words. They play hooky on the rooftop (Offsite, 2024). They quiet quit, slinking off to orgiastic liaisons behind closed office doors (Playtime, 2024).

In the artist’s summer 2024 exhibition “Playtime” at Charles Moffett, New York, the striped pajama-pant aesthetic of post-pandemic office wear is willfully confused with the striation of cell bars, figures doubly entrapped in “coffin cubicles.” The artist is sympathetic to the Severance-style repression implicit in the day-to-night of the bureaucratic worker and desiring self, stashing joys for the afterhours when, in Villafañe’s words, “you’re released into the wilderness again to become a rascal.” In his riotously duplicitous paintings, cabaret chorus lines converge with phalanxes of commuting automatons, masses of bodies that become sites of both work and play. 

Growing up in Los Angeles without a car, Jessica Magallanes Martinez spent a lot of time on the bus, especially on her four-hour commute from her home in South Central to Notre Dame Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Culver City. “That was the beginning of shaping all the observing,” she said. “The bus becomes this intimate, temporary space where you see the same people over and over. You build almost parasocial relationships. It presents the world in a different way.”

Another formative experience was an art history class in which she first saw photography presented as “art” in the form of images by Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. “It blew my mind,” she said. “I realized that there was a word for what I had always been doing, that there was a way to physically lock in the way I was framing and noticing moments.”

Pictures she took on bus travels between home and school got her into Syracuse University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in photography before moving on to an MFA at Columbia University. While photography remains the core of her practice, Magallanes Martinez has also ventured into performance, video, and, more recently, installation.

Her observational roots and the repetition of photographing familiar places continue to inform Magallanes Martinez’s image-making today. “A big part of my work is time as a character,” she said, noting that she prefers shooting with a medium-format camera, in harsh afternoon light. “I’m interested in the sun as a character, the way it erodes and erases layers of history. The sun is something that illuminates but is also destructive.”

Another point of interest is the Virgen de Guadalupe, which—with its loaded histories across Catholicism, the Chicano civil rights movement, and feminist critique—has long been a subject of Magallanes Martinez’s pictures. She ascribes her relationship with that imagery to a personal connection with the death of a young man who was shot in a gang initiation as he was leaving her neighbor’s house next door. The bullet that hit him was only feet from Magallanes Martinez’s bed.

She began photographing his death shrine with her own form of photographic religiosity, and then turned to shooting other death shrines nearby; she continues this zealous recording whenever she returns to LA. “It opened my eyes to things that I had always grown up with,” she said, adding that it made her think about “what had happened to my neighborhood to create an environment like that.”

Last year, Magallanes Martinez began a new series in which she and others step into the roles of the Virgen de Guadalupe and San Juan Diego, to whom the Virgen appeared. Blurring the line between representation and abstraction, the new pictures—which she produces as cyanotypes on large swaths of fabric—are what she calls “sacred honorific images of my body” that aim to show that “my body should be valued.”

She added, in relationship to her teaching at her alma mater, Syracuse, “I think about what I ask my students to do: imagine the worlds that they want to exist and try rendering that. I am trying to do that myself too.” 

Hood Niggas Camping, a set of 28 paintings from 2020 inspired by Lamborghini sports cars, bears a trait characteristic of David-Jeremiah: a maximalist impulse that produces works of significant scale and densely layered content. Lamborghini references run through many of his works, and the ideal installation of Hood Niggas Camping, the artist said, is “in a massive circle, comprised of larger-than-life, Stonehenge-esque pedestals that act as freestanding chunks on a white cube wall.” 

His vision for the work is to evoke what he describes as “peak Texas hot.” He continued: “Have you ever looked at a fellow camper from across a campfire? The fire tricks you into believing that the best way to see the person in front of you is from its perspective. From this vantage point, you are the flame. You’re not on fire—you are fire. A fire to keep some hood niggas who decided to go camping warm.”

Since his first solo exhibition in 2020, David-Jeremiah has been a persistent phenom on the Texas art scene. His urgency and methodical studio practice emerged from a period of self-evaluation after spending nearly four years in prison for aggravated robbery committed when he was a teenager. While in prison, he conceived ideas for several series of works. Hood Niggas Camping was one of them. Another was a collection of paintings based on Lamborghini steering wheels.

Titled I Drive Thee (2021–23), the series—on view at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, through January—explores how some Lamborghinis are named after bulls that end up killing matadors. One example is the Lamborghini Miura, alluding to a breed of Spanish bulls that are large, fierce, and cunning. For David-Jeremiah, this description echoes the way the Black male body is often viewed as a site of masculinity, violence, and potential.

In another group of works, the “Acronym Paintings,” David-Jeremiah recognizes a duality between his pursuit of art in its purest forms and the realities of being a Black man in America. The acronyms “I.A.H.Y.F.F.A.W.D.” and “N.F.D.B.J.W.B.D.” represent indecipherable words of hate spoken aloud by the artist. Others represent internal dialogue imagined between a bull and a matador. “The original acronyms shrouded this sentiment from a certain type of Black person towards white people, but they’re limited by the fact that it’s just [a conversation between men],” he said. “I created a bull’s version of the acronyms, which elevates the conversation.”

David-Jeremiah has also worked in other forms. I Heart Micah (2019–23) is a video in which he puts bumper stickers on police cruisers that reference Micah Xavier Johnson, who killed five police officers in Dallas in 2016. The stickers are part of a fantasy narrative in which the police are grateful that their fellow officers were killed and reform their impulse to kill Black people. For The Lookout (2019), he staged a performance during which he lived in a cinder-block cell for three weeks.

Such works can be jarring and unsettling. There is no respite in David-Jeremiah’s oeuvre, just intensity and lots of awe, humor, shock, and dread. “I like being in control of how the practice evolves in and outside of ways I haven’t been able to,” he said. “Everything you push from yourself is beyond you. It’s righteous to leave a better version of yourself behind to keep the you you aren’t anymore company—just as it’s divine to send a better version of yourself forward to give hope to the you you aren’t yet.”