Arthur Jafa's New Museum Survey Traces Four Decades of Images, Music and American Life

NEW YORK — The New Museum is preparing to open what it calls the largest museum survey yet of Arthur Jafa's work, placing nearly four decades of film, photography, painting and sculpture across two floors of its expanded building. “Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony” is scheduled to run from Sept. 24 through Jan. 3, 2027. The title refers to jazz drummer Tony Williams, a clue to the rhythmic thinking that informs Jafa's moving-image practice.

The exhibition will bring together early work with major videos including 2016's “Love is the Message, The Message is Death” and “The White Album,” which won the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, according to the museum. New work and large-scale installations will sit alongside photographs and objects. That range resists a narrow account of Jafa as a filmmaker, even as his use of montage remains central to how many viewers first encountered his work.

Across mediums, Jafa has explored how images of Black life circulate through American culture: how they can document experience, carry music's emotional force and be stripped of context as they move through mass media. A museum survey offers visitors the chance to see not just individual videos but the connections among his archive, his cinematography and his newer objects. It also asks viewers to slow down in the face of material often encountered only as short clips.

The exhibition's impact cannot be judged before the public has seen its installation. What the museum has announced, however, is unusually broad in scope and duration, with an accompanying catalog and a run extending into January. For New York audiences, it is a chance to assess an artist's evolving visual language in one place rather than through a handful of widely shared works.