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The New Museum presents the largest museum survey exhibition to date of the work of Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, MS) on view September 24, 2026, through January 4, 2027, spanning two floors of the newly expanded New Museum to encompass the full breadth of the artist’s practice. Alongside the premiere of new work, Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony will feature Jafa’s most celebrated films, including Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) and the Golden Lion-winning The White Album (2019), as well as recent paintings, large-scale video and film installations, and a range of sculptural and photographic objects.
Over a nearly forty-year career, Arthur Jafa has sought to find new visual forms to capture the rhythm and realities of Black life in America. Jafa achieved early recognition as a cinematographer, working alongside celebrated filmmakers like Julie Dash, Stanley Kubrick, and Spike Lee. He has since gone on to become one of the most impactful visual artists of his generation working across an expansive range of mediums. I Am Tony, named for the legendary jazz drummer Tony Williams, will chart Jafa’s work from his earliest films to recent video installations, mapping the evolution of his filmic language whose syncopations and textures match the aspirations of Black popular music. Throughout his practice, Jafa has built a staggering visual archive of images that cuts across histories and arenas of culture. This material is collaged, montaged, and rearranged into “affective proximities”—a term Jafa borrows from friend and collaborator John Akomfrah—that illuminate and unsettle the ways that race is communicated and experienced through contemporary media today.
Confrontational and deeply affecting, Jafa’s work turns an unflinching eye toward the past while embodying and mirroring our contemporary obsession with masses of images or ‘content’. Through prolonged and thoughtful engagement with social media, internet culture, cinematic history, and popular music, Jafa wields an arsenal of images across his various working mediums, communicating the complexities of contemporary Black life, along with the way it is both imagined, commodified, and consumed. His work treats images as fugitive, virulent cultural agents, with consequential relationships to real physical bodies both past and present.
This exhibition spans Jafa’s artistic career over nearly four decades, including early works such as Monster (1988)—a self-portrait captured with the camera held up to a mirror. In this work, Jafa gives a prelude of everything that is to come, revealing both the camera and the artist who wields, manipulates, and delivers images with an unmistakable force. His powerful and resonant films have captured the collective imagination and experience of America amidst the nation’s growing awareness of the long history of institutional violence directed toward the Black community—especially when placed against a backdrop of the century-long ascension of Black culture, music, and entertainment to the forefront of our national identity.
Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Senior Curator, with Calvin Wang, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon with new contributions from Judith Butler, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Ekow Eshun, Mark Godfrey, J. Hoberman, Kara Keeling, Lawrence Rinder, Martine Syms, Hamza Walker, and Simone White, as well as an interview between the artist and Massimiliano Gioni.
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