Arthur Jafa's Largest Museum Survey, 'I Am Tony', Opens Across Two Floors of New York's New Museum

"I Am Tony", the first US museum survey to span the full breadth of Arthur Jafa's career, opened this week across two floors of New York's New Museum, running from 24 September through 31 January. The museum's own exhibition page and a review from Art Plugged both describe it as the largest institutional presentation to date of the Mississippi-born artist's nearly four-decade body of work.

Who Jafa is and why this show is overdue

Jafa built his early career as a cinematographer, working with directors including Julie Dash, Spike Lee and Stanley Kubrick, before moving into video art, painting, sculpture and photography exploring what the exhibition's own framing describes as the full breadth of Blackness in America. His 2016 video work Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, a rapid-fire montage of archival and found footage set to a Kanye West track, has become one of the most widely discussed pieces of video art of the past decade, and his 2019 film The White Album won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, the art world's highest honour for a single work.

What the title refers to

The exhibition's name is a nod to jazz drummer Tony Williams, a reference that situates Jafa's visual practice explicitly within a Black American musical lineage rather than treating the connection as incidental, consistent with how music, rhythm and improvisation recur across his film and video work more broadly. The show brings both pieces together with newer paintings, large-scale video and film installations, sculpture and photography that have not previously been shown as part of a single, unified survey.

Why the venue matters

The exhibition occupies the newly expanded New Museum, giving Jafa's large-scale video installations, which typically require significant wall space and controlled lighting to be shown properly, the physical room a career survey of this scale demands. New York institutions have staged individual Jafa pieces before, but a two-floor survey spanning his cinematography years through his most recent paintings is a different scale of commitment, one that treats his work as a body to be read across decades rather than encountered piece by piece.

What visitors will actually see

Visitors moving through the two floors will encounter the arc of a career that began behind other directors' cameras and became one of the more distinctive individual voices in American video art, with the show's juxtaposition of found-footage montage, original film and physical sculpture asking viewers to hold those different registers, documentary, appropriation and studio-made object, in view at the same time rather than treating them as separate practices. The exhibition runs through the end of January, giving New York audiences a four-month window to see the fullest account yet assembled of Jafa's work in one place.