The New Museum opened "Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony" this week, the most comprehensive survey to date of the video artist and cinematographer's nearly four-decade career. The show, which spans two floors of the museum's recently expanded Bowery building, runs through January 4 and brings together video installations, paintings, sculpture and photographic works alongside new pieces the artist has not previously shown.
The exhibition is organized by New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni with senior curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and curatorial assistant Calvin Wang. Its title honors the late jazz drummer Tony Williams, a touchstone for an artist whose work has long drawn on music, rhythm and the visual language of Black American life. Gioni has described the show as "a kind of peek into the creative universe of the artist," adding that its layout was "very much choreographed by the artist, with the artist."
A career built on rupture and repetition
Centerpieces of the survey include "Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death," Jafa's 2016 video work that set found footage of Black American history and pop culture to Kanye West's "Ultralight Beam," and "The White Album," the 2018 piece that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale the following year. Both works helped establish Jafa, previously known chiefly within art and film circles as a cinematographer on films including "Daughters of the Dust," as one of the most closely watched artists of his generation.
Critic Seph Rodney, writing about the show, called the experience of encountering Jafa's video work in person rare in its emotional force, noting that "it's rare that an artwork gives you permission to cry." The survey's scale is itself notable: it is the first time a single U.S. institution has attempted to show the full range of Jafa's output, from early photographic studies to the large-format video installations that made his name.
The opening lands during a packed week for New York's museums, with several institutions unveiling fall exhibitions simultaneously. For the New Museum, expanded in recent years to accommodate larger-scale installation work, "I Am Tony" is a marquee test of that additional gallery space. Tickets are available now, with the museum expecting the show to anchor its programming through the winter.
