©Arthur Jafa, Cover for I AM TONY, Edited by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni, with text contributions by Judith Butler, Ekow Eshun, Mark Godfrey, J. Hoberman, Kara Keeling, Lawrence Rinder, Martine Syms, Hamza Walker, and Simone White. Credit: Phaidon

Artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) has spent more than four decades contemplating the complexities, contradictions, and cadences of Black life in America. Working across film, photography, video installation, and sculpture, Jafa draws from an extensive collection of found and appropriated imagery, bringing together fragments of visual culture spanning generations and platforms. His work moves between social media videos, television recordings, celebrity interviews, and more, often placing seemingly disparate images in conversation. Through these juxtapositions, Jafa considers the ways Black life is represented, circulated, consumed, and understood, while examining the relationship between Black cultural expression and the enduring presence of the white gaze in Western cinema.

Instagram: @anamibia

©Arthur Jafa, Monster, 1988, printed 2017. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 in (25.4 × 20.3 cm). Courtesy the artist and Gladstone

©Arthur Jafa, Spread from I AM TONY, published by Phaidon

Published by Phaidon Press, Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony accompanies Jafa’s first museum survey, currently on view at the New Museum in New York through January 3, 2027. Edited by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni, the publication brings together more than twenty-five works spanning film, video installation, photography, and sculpture, including two of Jafa’s widely recognized works, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and The White Album (2018). Contributions from Judith Butler, Ekow Eshun, Mark Godfrey, J. Hoberman, Kara Keeling, Lawrence Rinder, Martine Syms, Hamza Walker, and Simone White provide additional perspectives on the artist’s practice. While I had little doubt of Jafa’s significance long before encountering this publication, spending time with four decades of his work further affirms his place among the most consequential artists working today.

©Arthur Jafa, Spread from I AM TONY, published by Phaidon

Across the publication, we encounter the Black body occupying and navigating a range of cultural spaces, from politics and athletics to music, entertainment, and internet culture. Historical imagery of lynchings, war, protest, and cinematic representation exists alongside contemporary images circulating through social media and other digital platforms. These images are not presented as isolated moments but as part of a larger visual continuum through which the histories and conditions of Black life are continually reproduced and reinterpreted. Jafa asks us to consider not only what images communicate, but also how they acquire meaning, who circulates them, and what happens when they move between physical and digital spaces. In an era defined by the seemingly endless production and consumption of visual media, this consideration feels particularly urgent. His work forces us to reckon with the past while guiding our awareness toward how we participate in the circulation of images in the present.

What I find especially compelling about Jafa’s practice is his refusal to allow Blackness to be understood solely through the lens of violence and suffering. In her contribution, “Arthur Jafa: Someone Said,” Simone White writes, “… it is definitely not a settled thing that within metaphysical and artistic circles that blackness cannot exist without terror.” This observation speaks to a central tension in Jafa’s work: the persistent association of Black life with violence, alongside the fullness of experiences that exceed that association. While Jafa does not turn away from anti-Black racism or the histories of violence that have shaped this country, he equally makes room for the joy, humor, and reprieve that have sustained Black communities across generations. Music, entertainment, celebrity, and internet culture become more than cultural references. They are also sites through which Black expression, creativity, and collective experience persist. The work does not ask us to look away from violence, an act that would be both impossible and irresponsible. However, it refuses to let violence become the focal point.

©Arthur Jafa, Spread from I AM TONY, published by Phaidon

This tension also brings to mind a passage from Judith Butler’s contribution, “Life and Death in the Mix: ‘The White Album,'” in which they write, “Black life is to be found precisely in, and as, that rushed and unresolved sequence, ongoing and never fully predictable.” There is something deeply resonant about this characterization of Black life as an ongoing contradiction, one that cannot be neatly resolved or contained by a singular narrative. To live as a Black person in America is to continually navigate the contradictions of a country whose histories and contemporary realities are inseparable from Black life, yet whose structures have persistently devalued it. One cannot fully examine America, historically or contemporarily, without acknowledging anti-Black racism and its foundational role in the country. At the same time, there is no American history without Black history, nor is there an America as we know it without Black people and Black culture. Jafa’s work holds these realities together without attempting to reconcile their tensions. Instead, he allows the images to speak to the intricacy of living within them.

©Arthur Jafa, Spread from I AM TONY, published by Phaidon

I am also drawn to the book’s design and its relationship to the very subject it seeks to examine. There is an intentional richness to its presentation of Blackness that invites a kind of looking I find difficult to separate from the experience of engaging with the work itself. I have often thought of Blackness as something that requires a certain proximity to fully see. This is not because it is obscured, but because we must be willing to get close enough to recognize its depth. This brings to mind the photographic practice of Roy DeCarava, whose deliberate underexposure invites sustained looking and a closer engagement with both the image and the people represented. In both instances, darkness is not something to be overcome or corrected, but something to spend time with. There is a particular vulnerability in approaching darkness, especially when darkness has long been constructed as something to fear. That fear, too, has become an American metaphor through which Black people have been perceived, represented, and treated. Yet there is an undeniable beauty in what can be found when we resist that impulse to turn away. Why should Blackness be something to fear when it holds such depth, beauty, and value? I believe the book’s visual presentation encourages us to linger within that question.

©Arthur Jafa, Spread from I AM TONY, published by Phaidon

Spending time with Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony ultimately left me thinking about the responsibilities that accompany looking. What does it mean to look? And, perhaps more importantly, what responsibility do we carry after looking? Jafa’s work does not offer an easy way out of these questions. He brings us into contact with images that are at once familiar, unsettling, celebratory, and difficult to reconcile, asking us to consider our own position as viewers and participants in the visual culture that surrounds us. His refusal to turn away from anti-Black racism is equally a refusal to let the viewer remain comfortably distant from it. The work demands confrontation while also insisting that Black life be seen in its fullness.

I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with this survey and revisiting the work of an artist whose practice continues to expand how we think about images, history, and the possibilities of visual culture. Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony is a significant publication for the breadth of work it brings together and the conversations it makes possible. I hope readers have the opportunity to spend time with both the book and the exhibition before the survey closes on January 3, 2027.

©Arthur Jafa, Pledge of Allegiance, 1899, 2017. Wallpaper, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone

©Arthur Jafa, Unbalanced Diptych, 2017. Wallpaper, dimensions variable. © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone

©Arthur Jafa, Monster II, 2018. Epson fi ne art print face-mounted to Diasec acrylic on aluminum panel, 78 × 61 7/8 in (198 × 157 cm). Courtesy the artist and Gladstone

©Arthur Jafa, HR, 2018. Epson fi ne art print mounted to aluminum, 82 × 64 in (208.3 × 162.6 cm). Private collection. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone

©Arthur Jafa, Bloods II, 2021. Epson fine art print mounted on aluminum panel, 52 × 80 1/2 in (132.1 × 204.7 cm). © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone

©Arthur Jafa, Picture Unit (Structures) II, 2024 (detail). Black mirrored acrylic, wood, wallpaper, metal rails, lights, 102 3/8 × 728 × 141 3/4 in (260 × 1849 × 360 cm). Installation view: RHAMESJAFACOSEYJAFADRAYTON, OGR Torino, 2022. Courtesy the artist and OGR Torino, Photo: Andrea Rossetti

©Arthur Jafa, Love is the Message, The Message is Death, 2016. Video, color, sound; 7:25 min. Installation view: Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, 2016. © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone. Photo: Thomas Mü ller

Edited by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni; contributions by Judith Butler, Ekow Eshun, Mark Godfrey, J. Hoberman, Kara Keeling, Lawrence Rinder, Martine Syms, Hamza Walker, and Simone White

Gary Carrion-Murayari is the Kraus Family Senior Curator at the New Museum.

Massimiliano Gioni is the Edlis Neeson Artistic Director at the New Museum.

Judith Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, where they helped create the Critical Theory Program and International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs. They are the author of several books on social and political thought, ethics, and literary and queer theory.

Ekow Eshun is a curator, writer, and broadcaster. Most recently, he is the curator of the British Art Show 10, the largest and most significant recurring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK, and the 13th SITE SANTA FE International Biennial, to be held in 2027.

Mark Godfrey is an independent curator based in London. He organized Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy of Arts (2025), Pino Pascali at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2024), and Nicole Eisenman: What Happened at Whitechapel Gallery in London (2023). He codirects New Curators, a one-year training program for curators from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

J. Hoberman is a film critic, journalist, author, and academic. He began working at The Village Voice in the 1970s, became a full-time staff writer in 1983, and was the newspaper’s senior film critic from 1988 to 2012. His most recent book is Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde – Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop (2025).

Kara Keeling is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Lawrence Rinder is Director Emeritus of the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He previously served as the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Dean of the College at California College of the Arts. He was the Founding Director of the Wattis Institute.

Martine Syms is an artist and director whose practice spans cinema, art, and theater. She is based in Los Angeles.

Hamza Walker is Director of The Brick, an independent nonprofit art space in Los Angeles.

Simone White is the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the writing faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.