I Drive Thee

The artist

David-Jeremiah (b. 1985, Oak Cliff, Texas; lives and works in Dallas) is a conceptual artist whose earlier work has confronted incarceration and the commodification of Black life. I Drive Thee was his first institutional solo show outside Texas — the fifth in the Clark's public-spaces series, curated by Robert Wiesenberger. The Lamborghini has been a years-long muse, as much for its muscular design as for its mythology; he is a deliberate outsider to the blue-chip pipeline, which is part of the work's charge.

The book

It documents a year-long installation on the Clark Center's lower level and in the reading room of the Manton Research Center (on view through January 26, 2025). The show gathered three key tondos from private and public collections and closed the cycle with a new, site-specific work of sculpture, photographs, and video staging the cremation of the final tondo — the one representing anima, the soul that outlives the vanquished bull.

How it reads

Because it is tied to a specific, partly self-destroying installation, the catalogue functions as the durable trace of a work built to disappear. It arrives as early-career institutional validation — reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail, announced through e-flux — rather than settled art history, so read it as the record of a moment rather than a final verdict.

For more context

The bull-and-spectacle imagery joins a long line in art, from Goya's and Picasso's corridas onward; the reckoning with Black masculinity and American spectacle places it among contemporaries working the same difficult ground.

Sources

• Clark Art Institute exhibition page
• The Williams Record on the debut
• Brooklyn Rail review
• e-flux announcement