Arthur Jafa’s work, showcased in the New Museum’s retrospective "I Am Tony" in New York, delves into challenging and often unsettling themes through a blend of playful and disturbing imagery. The exhibition invites viewers to confront their discomfort and explore the complexities behind it, offering a nuanced reflection on race, identity, and American history.
Jafa, an artist born in Tupelo, Mississippi, who studied film and architecture at Howard University, has built his career around reassembling found photographs and videos into poetic and provocative collages. His method involves transforming private notebooks of cutout images into large-scale installations that juxtapose tenderness and violence, joy and trauma.
One of the exhibition’s focal points is the half-hour montage "SloPEX" (2022), which cycles rapidly through a range of visuals, including celebrities singing or smoking, scenes from animated films, balloons at parades, and graphic images of bodies that are mutilated or bound. The contrast between endearing and harrowing scenes has a disorienting effect that challenges viewers’ emotional responses.
The show opens with “Pledge of Allegiance” (2017), a mural-sized photograph depicting Black schoolchildren in 1899 performing a straight-armed salute to the US flag. Although initially reminiscent of a fascist gesture, the pose predates its association with Nazism and reflects a once-common American custom. The image has gained renewed resonance amid contemporary discussions about systemic racism and the historical links between Jim Crow laws and Nazi ideology.
Jafa’s work often presents paired archival portraits to explore different modes of Black artistic expression. For example, a photograph of James Baldwin, sharply lit and formally dressed, sits opposite a spectral image of Miles Davis, whose glowing eyes emerge from darkness—contrasting Baldwin’s verbal intensity with Davis’s enigmatic reticence.
Having worked as a cinematographer on films including Julie Dash’s "Daughters of the Dust," Spike Lee’s "Crooklyn," and Stanley Kubrick’s "Eyes Wide Shut," Jafa found traditional commercial cinema creatively limiting. He gravitated toward galleries and museums, where his short films and collages have appeared in prominent exhibitions, though he has also critiqued the art world’s predominantly white environment.
Jafa gained international attention with his 2016 video "Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death," which serves as a centerpiece of the New Museum show. This eight-minute montage features historical and contemporary footage of Black individuals experiencing ecstasy, sorrow, anger, and celebration to the backdrop of Kanye West’s "Ultralight Beam." The video moves swiftly between scenes, including images of James Brown, Nina Simone, Serena Williams, and Barack Obama, among others, without offering a direct political statement, leaving the emotional intensity open to interpretation.
Following this, Jafa’s 2018 work "The White Album" shifts focus to whiteness, portraying white people as perpetrators, victims, and commentators on race. The piece includes images such as Dylann Roof entering the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and Reginald Denny being beaten during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Unlike the visceral impact of "Love Is the Message," "The White Album" is perceived by some as less compelling, presenting broad themes of alienation and grievance without a cohesive narrative or provocation. Nonetheless, the work earned the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
The exhibition’s expansive scope results in varying degrees of success among individual pieces. For example, a diptych pairing Andy Warhol’s car-crash silkscreen with a late Rothko abstraction attempts to combine themes of destruction and melancholy but is regarded as less effective. In contrast, "Mickey Mouse Was a Scorpio" (2017) juxtaposes a classic Mickey Mouse illustration with a photograph of a Black masquerader at the Notting Hill Carnival wearing skull-like whiteface. This pairing resonates deeply, highlighting the historical connections between iconic animated characters and blackface minstrelsy, thus layering a seemingly playful image with complex racial history.
"I Am Tony" runs through January 4, offering an immersive experience that navigates the tensions between beauty and brutality, familiarity and estrangement, inviting audiences to engage with the challenging legacies embedded in Jafa’s art.