The largest museum survey of Arthur Jafa’s work to date brings four decades of films, videos, sculpture, photography, and new work to the expanded New Museum.
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Arthur Jafa’s images rarely sit quietly. They collide, accelerate, fracture, and repeat—drawing connections between Black cultural expression, American history, music, violence, memory, and the overwhelming circulation of images. Now, the New Museum is giving that expansive practice its most comprehensive museum presentation yet.
On September 25, 2026, the New Museum opens Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, a major survey spanning two floors of the museum’s expanded Bowery building. The exhibition runs through January 4, 2027, according to the museum’s current exhibition listing.
The exhibition brings together more than four decades of Jafa’s artistic practice, including celebrated films and videos alongside paintings, photographic works, sculptures, and new projects. The accompanying publication describes the presentation as encompassing more than twenty-five acclaimed works and 165 reproduced images across Jafa’s films, videos, installations, photographs, and sculptures.
A Practice Built Around the Moving Image
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1960, Jafa has developed a practice that moves between filmmaking, visual art, photography, sculpture, and installation.
At the center of that practice is a recurring question about how visual media can communicate the emotional and cultural force found in Black music and Black life. The New Museum describes his work as addressing both specific and universal forms of Black experience while moving between objects, static images, moving images, and other forms of visual culture.
That interdisciplinary approach is particularly important to I Am Tony. Rather than presenting Jafa as exclusively a filmmaker or exclusively a visual artist, the survey brings different parts of his practice into the same institutional framework.
Among the major works included are Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and The White Album (2018/2019), alongside recent paintings, large-scale video and film installations, photographic works, and sculptural objects. The White Album received the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death
One of Jafa’s best-known works, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, exemplifies his distinctive approach to montage.
The seven-minute video brings together found and circulating imagery to move between representations of Black suffering, cultural achievement, collective memory, spirituality, music, and everyday life.
Its rapid editing creates a visual rhythm that can feel closer to musical composition than conventional documentary filmmaking. The result is an artwork that asks how images of Black life are produced, circulated, remembered, and emotionally experienced.
The work has also become part of the wider museum and cultural landscape, having been presented by institutions internationally.
The White Album
If Love Is the Message explores Black cultural experience through an intensely compressed visual language, The White Album turns Jafa’s attention toward representations of whiteness and white supremacy in American visual culture.
The work became internationally prominent after receiving the Golden Lion for best artist at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Its inclusion in I Am Tony places one of Jafa’s most internationally recognized works within the larger trajectory of his practice rather than treating it as an isolated statement.
Together, the two films demonstrate the range of Jafa’s approach to found imagery and montage—one of the defining characteristics of his artistic language.
Why “I Am Tony”?
The exhibition’s title refers to Tony Williams, the influential jazz drummer associated with Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet.
The reference is more than a biographical footnote. Jafa has repeatedly approached images through ideas of rhythm, syncopation, sampling, repetition, improvisation, and musical structure.
The New Museum’s exhibition description connects the evolution of Jafa’s filmic language with the aspirations and rhythms of Black popular music.
In this context, the title I Am Tony becomes a way of thinking about artistic practice through musical intelligence: how separate fragments can be assembled into something whose emotional power exceeds the individual parts.
A New Chapter for the New Museum
The exhibition arrives during an important moment for the New Museum itself.
The museum’s expanded Bowery building has entered a new phase in 2026, with a larger exhibition program and multiple fall openings. The New Museum describes itself as the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art and says its expansion was designed by OMA.
Jafa’s survey anchors this new season alongside Diego Marcon: Arrivederci, Piggies!, The Bowery: Devil’s Mile, and the Hyundai Translocal Series: Ho Tzu Nyen.
The scale of I Am Tony therefore reflects both the breadth of Jafa’s career and the expanded capacity of the museum.
Beyond the Galleries
The New Museum is extending Jafa’s exhibition into its public programming.
On December 3, Jafa will appear at the museum in conversation with economist and author Tyler Cowen. The program will examine Jafa’s career and his search for new visual forms for Black life in America.
The following day, December 4, the New Museum will partner with Metrograph for a screening of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), followed by a conversation between Jafa and cinematographer Bradford Young.
Jafa served as cinematographer on Daughters of the Dust, making the screening particularly relevant to understanding his filmmaking background and his relationship to Black visual culture.
The film’s circular narrative and attention to memory, migration, inheritance, and Gullah Geechee culture also provide a useful point of connection to Jafa’s broader interest in how images carry cultural memory across generations.
Image, Memory, and American Culture
I Am Tony ultimately presents Jafa’s career as an ongoing investigation into the power of images.
His work has developed during an era in which photography and video have moved from relatively controlled cultural forms into an environment of continuous circulation. Images now arrive through museums, cinema, television, social media, phones, archives, and algorithms.
Jafa’s practice engages that condition directly. His works can feel simultaneously archival and immediate, historical and contemporary, personal and collective.
At the New Museum, those different dimensions are brought together across two floors, allowing visitors to encounter the evolution of an artist whose work has consistently challenged the boundaries between cinema, contemporary art, photography, sculpture, and popular culture.
For New York, I Am Tony is also a reminder of the city’s longstanding role as a place where visual art, music, filmmaking, and Black cultural production continually intersect.
At 235 Bowery, Arthur Jafa’s images now occupy a museum expanded specifically to accommodate ambitious contemporary art. The result is a meeting between an evolving institution and an artist whose practice has spent decades asking what images can do—and what they can make us see.
