B M W (A Black Man’s Wish)

Devin Troy Strother

Info: Devin Troy Strother (b. 1986, lives and works in Los Angeles, US) presents his fourth solo exhibition with R;68 in Cologne. The show B M W (A Black Man’s Wish) borrows its title from a phrase that emerged from the aspirational culture of 1980s Harlem. Humorous on the surface, the expression reflects a time when European luxury cars functioned as symbols of status, mobility, and success. Within that world, the BMW became more than a vehicle, it represented arrival, visibility, and the fantasy of escaping economic limitation. Strother himself owns a black 2012 328-i BMW station wagon, a detail that shifts the work from cultural observation into something more personal and self-reflective. The title operates both sincerely and ironically: The object once imagined as unattainable is now ordinary, practical, even domestic. That tension between aspiration and reality sits at the center of the work. The work also exists within a long tradition of reinterpreting corporate symbols through black vernacular, humor, and cultural slang, transforming luxury branding into something communal, coded, and emotionally loaded. B M W (A Black Man’s Wish) reframes the car as a psychological and symbolic object, one tied to desire, projection, identity, and performance.