LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- Jasmine Gregory’s first institutional exhibition in the US presents a focused selection of new works, including a large-scale, site-specific installation created for MoMA PS1. On view October 10, 2024 through February 17, 2025, Who Wants to Die for Glamour emphasizes Gregory’s spatial approach to painting, featuring tightly rendered canvases maneuvered into sprawling sculptural tableaux. Commingling paintings with items such as wine bottles, wire hangers, tinsel, and studio refuse, she weaves scenarios whose ambiguous drama reflects the difficulty of digesting and producing within hyper-saturated cultural landscapes. Extending her interest in the material histories of image-making and display, the exhibition considers transparency, fragmentation, and dissolution in relation to both artistic production and racial capitalism.
A plexiglass vitrine suspended aloft from the gallery’s four corners anchors the exhibition. Illuminated from within, the installation evokes a discarded trophy case whose prizes spill out into the space.
Gregory invokes conventions of display intended to preserve and glorify while subjecting them to physical stress and entropic energy. In her work, excess and disintegration pull at the seams of conventional understandings of self-presentation, Black excellence, virtuosity, and patrimony. Influenced by theoretical frameworks put forth in Calvin L. Warren’s book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, Emancipation (2018), Gregory’s approach counters the individualism of liberal humanism by messing with the visual forms—advertisements, portraits, architectures—that perpetuate it.
Since 2022, Gregory has appropriated advertisements for wealth management firms and luxury watch companies in her paintings, rendering their glossy photographic surfaces by hand. Who Wants to Die for Glamour features two of these large-scale paintings, in which the advertisements’ coy taglines become provocations to consider questions of inheritance. Investment Piece No. 7 (2024) declares: “You never really own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” She pairs these paintings with monochrome canvases whose willful blankness offers an iconoclastic riposte to the confident incantations of ad-speech.
The exhibition’s title draws on a line from the John Waters film Female Trouble (1974), in which the protagonist, ascendant performer Dawn Davenport, exclaims, “Who wants to die for art?” before firing a gun into the crowd of her nightclub act—the ultimate act of extinguishing the very attention one seeks.
Jasmine Gregory (American, b. 1987) was born in Washington, D.C. and currently lives and works in Zurich. She holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA from Züricher Hochschule der Künste, Zurich. Her work was the subject of a recent solo exhibition at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and she has held solo exhibitions at Karma International, Zurich; Martina Simeti, Milan; Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna; King’s Leap, New York; and Istituto Svizzero, Milan. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues including Le Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg; and Kunsthalle Zürich. Her work appears in publications such as Artforum, BOMB, Flash Art, PW-Magazine, and Mousse. As a representative of Black Artists and Cultural Workers in Switzerland, she participated in a conversation titled “Reimagining the Museum, Open Letters and a Decolonial Framework” in 2020 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour is organized by Jody Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.
