Arthur Jafa Retrospective Opens at New Museum

The New Museum in New York is hosting "Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony," a significant retrospective exhibition of the artist's diverse body of work, running from September 24, 2026, through January 3, 2027. This exhibition, spanning the museum's third and fourth floors, marks Jafa's first U.S. museum survey to encompass the full spectrum of his artistic practice, including film, photography, sculpture, painting, and installation art. The retrospective aims to trace how Jafa's engagement with juxtaposition, Black visual culture, and the pervasive circulation of images has fundamentally shaped his artistic output.

The exhibition draws its title from the influential jazz drummer Tony Williams, and it features seminal works such as "Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death" and "The White Album." Alongside these established pieces, the show also includes more recent creations and entirely new works, offering a comprehensive view of Jafa's evolving artistic journey. The initial viewing experience of "Love Is the Message" in November 2016 at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Harlem, shortly after a presidential election, is recalled as a powerful encounter. This film, set to Kanye West's "Ultralight Beam," presented a rapid-fire succession of images depicting Black life, blending family footage, athletes, musicians, instances of police violence, and well-known figures with unfamiliar faces. The impact was more emotional than visual, characterized by a dynamic interplay between the beautiful and the brutal, the intimate and the publicly broadcast.

A particularly engaging collection within the exhibition consists of Jafa's archival binders. These binders are densely packed with a vast array of images Jafa has meticulously collected over many years. They contain anonymous family photographs, clippings from magazines, advertisements, scans of album covers, and historical materials. Featured within these collections are portraits and references to cultural figures like Marvin Gaye and MF DOOM, alongside images that evoke a sense of cultural familiarity or appear to be unearthed from a bygone era. One spread within these binders, for example, includes a magazine clipping, illustrating Jafa's method of juxtaposing diverse visual elements to create new meanings and dialogues. The exhibition highlights Jafa's consistent exploration of how images are consumed, recontextualized, and imbued with meaning across different cultural landscapes and historical periods.