Jeremiah Day “the people” (Pelham Town Hall, Oldest In Continuous Use For Town Meeting), 2026 Type C Print With Acrylic Paint & Ink 35.5 x 50.5 cm Edition of 15, each unique Price: €560,- (ex. VAT)
Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS is delighted to present a new limited edition print by Jeremiah Day titled “the people” (Pelham Town Hall, Oldest In Continuous Use For Town Meeting). Proceeds of sales will support a series of performances and public events by the artist across the United States, where he will reflect on US revolutionary and imperialist political history and articulate gathering spaces to respond to the current Trump administration.
The print image comes from the 2016 slide-show performance the chair remains empty / but the place is set, which bridged the spontaneous assemblies of post-Gezi Istanbul to the New England town hall meetings which inspired historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt––a recurrent inspiration in Day’s work. The image depicts the town meeting hall of Pelham, Massachusetts, a room which has been continuously holding self-governing assemblies since 1743, longer than any other place in the US. The picture is available for the first time as a print, with a hand-written text, of 15.
The first events will take place at the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York City on May 1st and 2nd. Day will offer two programs with different approaches to embodiment, imagination and the meaning of gathering in assembly. The point of departure of Day’s performance on May 1st is a vision of assembly itself and its potential, best explored by Hannah Arendt and what she called the “nameless treasure” of council democracy. On May 2nd, Day will present Without The Consent Of The People, a new book by the late Fred Dewey, a long-time friend and collaborator of the artist. Co-edited by Day, this book contains Dewey’s critique of the US as a “ state” and affirmative strategies and arguments for how it can be counteracted by gathering.
Day is returning to the Emily Harvey Foundation for the first time since 2018, following ten years of collaboration between Fred Dewey, Simone Forti and himself which manifested in presentations at the Emily Harvey Foundation, the ICA in London, and The Box in Los Angeles.
Jeremiah Day's work – through photography, performance, text and installation – represents a consistent investigation into art’s capacity for the civic, one materialised through subjective traces and a personal narrative style that grounds political thinking in tender experience. From 2014-2019, Day focused almost exclusively on live performance, producing a series of slide-show performances, often with musician Bart de Kroon, combining improvised movement and text with documentary investigations into military bases, anti-war organising efforts, historic and contemporary town-meeting forms. Day’s recent work focuses on structures of group improvisation in which political themes are explored through forms of production which themselves propose models of working and struggling together.
Day has recently exhibited his work at Netwerk Aalst (Aalst), Villa Romana (Florence), Centre d'Art Le Lait (Albi), and Badische Kunstverein (Karlsruhe). Recent performances include Means and Ends at Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, and Response Abilities For Yasiin Bey at Rijksakademie Amsterdam.
