The New Museum in Manhattan presents Arthur Jafa’s most extensive survey to date, I Am Tony, on view from September 25th, 2026 to January 31st, 2027. Occupying two floors of the museum’s expanded building, the exhibition brings together four decades of Arthur Jafa works, with a sharp focus on Black visual culture and his charged interplay of image, sound, and memory.
Arthur Jafa’s works: from early experiments to monumental image-assemblage
The presentation traces the trajectory of Arthur Jafa works from early photographic and film experiments to large-scale installations. Central is Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), where archival footage, news clips, and music collide in a searing montage set to Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam, condensing joy, rupture, and collective memory into a pulsating visual field.
Alongside it, The White Album (2018)—winner of the Golden Lion—probes constructions of whiteness through fractured imagery and conceptual montage. New commissions extend Jafa’s inquiry into how media flows, breaks apart, and reshapes perception.
‘Love is the Message’
In Love is the Message, Jafa builds a visual language that works like music—layered, syncopated, emotionally volatile. Fragments of Black visual culture—music videos, protest scenes, everyday gestures, and film references—form a dense emotional register of American life. Narrative gives way to rhythm, where images shift between fracture and resonance.
This logic carries through the exhibition, where installations and video works echo repetition and remix, placing the viewer inside a shifting visual score.
Black visual culture as archive, rhythm and resistance
The exhibition frames Black visual culture as both an archive and a living system, where history is constantly rewritten through images. Jafa’s practice examines how Black life is seen, circulated, and refracted within global media, often holding beauty, violence, and joy in uneasy proximity.
Across archival materials, early works, and new installations, he builds a visual grammar that resists simplification, moving between documentary immediacy and cinematic abstraction, and collapsing the distance between personal and collective memory.
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, and Calvin Wang, the survey affirms Jafa as one of the most decisive image-makers of his generation—an artist who continually redefines how we see, sense, and interpret the world through screens.
Pledge of Allegiance, 1899, 2017
