Los Angeles — As many museums nationwide adopt a cautious approach to their fall exhibition seasons amid political pressures, the New Museum in New York is preparing to present a major retrospective of artist-filmmaker Arthur Jafa, whose work powerfully addresses themes of race and identity in the United States.
Opening Thursday and running through January 3, the exhibition, titled “I Am Tony,” marks Jafa’s most comprehensive museum survey to date. Curated in part by Massimiliano Gioni, director of the New Museum, the show offers a pointed counter-narrative to the current cultural climate. Gioni noted that the exhibition provides an alternative way to observe the country’s 250th anniversary during a period when many institutions are scaling back programming around liberationist themes related to race and gender.
Jafa, renowned for his 2016 film “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” creates urgent visual essays grappling with Blackness and systemic racism in America. The film opens with footage of police killing a Black man, followed by an image of President Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace,” then unfolds through a rapid sequence of potent imagery set to a gospel-inflected track by Kanye West. Originally shown at Gavin Brown’s gallery in Harlem during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and early into the Trump administration, the work quickly became emblematic of artistic protest, later streamed across numerous museum websites.
Complementing this piece in the New Museum show is Jafa’s 2019 work “The White Album,” which presents a stark and unflinching survey of American white supremacist culture through a montage of found images. This film earned Jafa the Golden Lion award for best artist at the 2019 Venice Biennale. With both films as focal points, the “I Am Tony” exhibition navigates between expressions of outrage and elation, reflecting contrasting experiences within the nation’s troubled racial history.
Jafa, who draws the exhibition’s title from Tony Williams, the legendary drummer who collaborated with Miles Davis, commented on the contemporary political landscape during a summer interview. He framed the recent resurgence of white nationalist sentiment and the “Make America Great Again” movement as deliberate attempts to erase historical memory. While expressing a belief in eventual justice, he acknowledged the challenging and painful struggles that lie ahead.
The New Museum’s decision to foreground Jafa’s work underscores the ongoing tensions between cultural institutions’ commitment to exploring difficult social realities and external pressures discouraging engagement with such themes. As a result, “I Am Tony” stands out as a bold statement amid a season of retreat from politically charged exhibitions.