The Arthur Jafa piece most people know runs about seven minutes and plays over Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam.” “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death” (2016) cuts news clips, music videos and original footage into one rush of Black visual culture, and it’s now a single stop in the biggest Jafa show ever staged. Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony opened to the public Sept. 24 and fills two floors of the New Museum’s newly expanded Bowery building.
The title is a tribute to Tony Williams, the drummer who helped develop an irregular, open style of jazz in Miles Davis’s 1960s quintet. It fits an artist whose films have always run on music. In recent interviews, Hypebeast reports, Jafa has described the exhibition as closer to a record or a DJ set than a traditional survey.
Where the sampling starts
The clearest key to the show is the binders. Jafa has clipped images since he was young, long before the films, and the New Museum lays that archive out page by page: anonymous family photographs, magazine clippings, ads and scans of album covers, with portraits of Marvin Gaye and MF DOOM among them. A clipping of Goodyear tires sits beside an ancient African totem. The charge comes from placement, not from a hidden code, as Hypebeast’s reviewer put it.
Read moreRoy Lichtenstein’s Whitney Retrospective Says He Saw the Repost Coming
Around them are the films that made his name. The White Album, a 30-minute film on the construct of whiteness, earned him the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Hyperallergic notes. “akingdoncomethas” (2018) pulls sermons, performances and footage from Black church culture. “AGHDRA” trades collage for a digitally rendered black ocean, and “BEN GAZARRA” reworks the violent ending of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
The newest pieces look a lot like your feed. Hypebeast describes TikToks, phone videos and goth LARPers, the kind of clips you’d scroll past in five seconds. On a museum wall you can’t, and that’s the point: Jafa makes you wonder why he picked them.
It’s rare that an artwork gives you permission to cry.
Seph Rodney, critic, on watching “Love Is the Message” in 2017, Hyperallergic, 2017
The résumé behind the cuts
Jafa was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and studied architecture at Howard University before moving to Los Angeles to shoot films. He has shot films for directors including Stanley Kubrick, and he directed Jay-Z’s “4:44” video, per Hyperallergic. The New Museum’s own description puts his subject in one sentence: the growing awareness of institutional violence against Black Americans set against “the ascension of Black culture, music, and entertainment in American national identity,” as quoted by Hypebeast.
Hypebeast’s reviewer came away feeling that Jafa isn’t building an argument so much as holding a contradiction open, with Black life celebrated and consumed in the same frame.
The survey is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, who runs the New Museum, with Senior Curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and curatorial assistant Calvin Wang. It runs into early January 2027 alongside two other New Museum shows, Diego Marcon: Arrivederci, Piggies! and The Bowery: Devil’s Mile.
- Where
- New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York (third and fourth floors)
- Opened
- Sept. 24, 2026; runs into early January 2027
- Curators
- Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Calvin Wang
- Soundtrack
- Includes Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” in “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death”
Sources
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.
