Largest-Ever Arthur Jafa Survey Coming to New Museum
The two-floor show will premiere new works alongside the artist’s iconic pieces, such as "Love is the Message, The Message is Death."
The New Museum will hold the largest-ever survey exhibition of works by filmmaker and multimedia artist Arthur Jafa this September, the institution announced on Tuesday, June 9.
Titled I Am Tony in honor of the late jazz drummer Tony Williams, the exhibition will fill two floors of the New Museum's recently expanded Manhattan building in a showcase of works from Jafa's nearly four-decade career interrogating “Black being.” The survey, scheduled to open on September 24, will run through January 4, 2027.
I Am Tony will feature some of Jafa's most iconic works, including “Love is the Message, The Message is Death” (2016), a video montage set to Kanye West's “Ultralight Beam” that assembles archival and contemporary elements of Black visual culture including news clips, music videos, and original footage. The work was simultaneously livestreamed for 48 hours by over a dozen institutions in June 2020, at the height of Black Lives Matter protests against racist violence.
“It’s rare that an artwork gives you permission to cry,” critic Seph Rodney wrote for Hyperallergic in 2017. “Watching ‘Love Is The Message; The Message Is Death’ (2016), the seven-minute video by the cinematographer and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, I feel I have that.”
Jafa's 30-minute film The White Album (2018), a critique of the social construct of whiteness that earned the artist a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, will also be shown in the exhibition, alongside the premiere of new works.
The survey's reference to Williams, who coined an irregular, open style of jazz drumming as a member of the Miles Davis Quintet in the 1960s, builds upon Jafa's dialogue with Black popular music in his pulsating films.
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Jafa studied architecture at Howard University before moving to Los Angeles to pursue cinematography. In addition to video works now held in the collections of the country's preeminent contemporary art institutions, Jafa has shot films for directors including Stanley Kubrick and directed Jay-Z's 4:44 music video.
The forthcoming survey will be curated by New Museum Artistic Director Massimiliano Gioni alongside Senior Curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and Curatorial Assistant Calvin Wang. Two other shows in the New Museum fall and winter series, Diego Marcon: Arrivederci, Piggies! and The Bowery: Devil’s Mile, will run concurrently with I Am Tony.
