Arthur Jafa’s Largest Museum Survey Opens at the New Museum

Arthur Jafa’s first U.S. museum survey to encompass the full breadth of his practice opens at New York’s New Museum on September 24, filling two floors with nearly four decades of films, photographs, sculptures, paintings, and installations. Its importance lies not only in scale: the exhibition tests whether the musical logic behind Jafa’s moving images can hold a career together across radically different media.

 
 

Arthur Jafa’s First Full-Breadth U.S. Museum Survey

The New Museum describes Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony as the first U.S. museum survey to encompass the full breadth of Jafa’s practice. It occupies two floors of the expanded Bowery building and moves from his earliest films to recent video installations, with premieres of new work alongside sculpture, photography, and painting.

The title honors jazz drummer Tony Williams. That choice supplies more than a namesake: the museum says the show charts how Jafa built a film language whose syncopations and textures pursue the ambitions of Black popular music. Jafa has formulated that ambition more directly over the years as making a Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music.

The institution and The New York Times give the public run as September 24, 2026, through January 3, 2027. Apollo’s September 18 preview instead lists September 25 through January 4. Published schedules conflict: the New Museum’s program announcement lists September 24–January 4, Cotter’s September 14 Times preview lists September 24–January 3, and Apollo lists September 25–January 4.

 

The expanded New Museum on the Bowery in June 2026. Photograph by Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; cropped.

 
 

What Is Confirmed—and What Was Still Moving

Two celebrated films are firmly identified as anchors: Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death and The White Album, the latter associated with Jafa’s Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The museum also promises recent paintings, large-scale film and video installations, sculptural and photographic objects, and new work.

The exact checklist was not fixed when Holland Cotter’s New York Times preview appeared on September 14. Cotter reported that the show included nine videos, while Jafa was still considering a mural-scale abstract painting titled More Real and a new video centered on Michael Jackson. A 2002 sculptural installation that the museum wanted reconstructed appeared in Jafa’s digital mock-up, but even a curator was checking whether it remained there.

Status before opening	Work or group	Basis
Confirmed	Love Is the Message; The White Album	Named by the museum
Reported in the installation	Nine videos; photographs, sculpture, paintings, wallpaper	Times studio preview
Still possible	More Real; Michael Jackson video	Artist was still adding work

That instability is part of the art rather than merely a planning problem. Jafa told the Times that he thinks of the exhibition as an experience resembling a record album or DJ set, not as a row of self-contained masterpieces. The provisional checklist therefore matters: it separates the museum’s settled public promise from work that may only be confirmed once the doors open.

 
 

How Black Music’s Structure Moves Across Five Media

The survey’s range can look like a list of formats. A closer map shows a repeated method: accumulation, interruption, recurrence, and emotionally charged juxtaposition migrate from the edit to the wall, the room, and the object.

• Montage: Love Is the Message compresses found and original footage into roughly seven minutes, moving between racist violence and Black creativity to the rises and falls of Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam.” The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which presented the work in 2017, describes imagery drawn from news, television, the internet, and Jafa’s own earlier film. Editing makes unlike images behave like phrases in a musical composition.
• Duration and installation: The 2018 akingdoncomethas expands that principle to nearly two hours. Glenstone’s institutional record says footage of Black fellowship and musical oratory is intercut with wildfires, with a running time that approximates a church service. Monumental projection turns rhythm into something bodily and architectural.
• Photography: In La Scala, a 2018 self-portrait reported for the New Museum show, Jafa appears in drag as Mary Jones, a nineteenth-century New York sex worker. Instead of a montage unfolding in time, one staged image compresses historical reference, self-performance, and unstable identity.
• Sculpture: The proposed reconstruction from 2002 combines the body of a ruined Pontiac Trans Am, allusions to Blaxploitation cinema, and a John Coltrane recording. Its “edit” is physical: vehicle, film history, and sound meet as an assemblage rather than as successive shots.
• Painting and wallpaper: The announced recent paintings and wallpapers move repetition and scale onto surfaces. More Real, if installed, would extend that experiment to mural size. Since it remained a possible addition in the September 14 account, it should not yet be treated as a confirmed centerpiece.

This through-line also explains why Jafa belongs within video art without being contained by it. Sound, editing, projection, and screen duration remain foundational, but the operative principle is association. A photograph can function like a held note; an assemblage can behave like a hard cut; a two-floor installation can order encounters like tracks on an album. That is an editorial reading of the evidence, not a claim that every object literally imitates music.

 
 

Why “Largest” Is Not the Same as “First Major Show”

The New Museum survey is unprecedented in the United States, but it does not arrive without substantial precedents. In 2021, Denmark’s Louisiana Museum called Magnumb the biggest presentation of Jafa’s art to that date. It combined key films, a new video made for the exhibition, and numerous works in other media. That record establishes an earlier multidisciplinary museum benchmark outside the United States.

Glenstone then mounted Jafa’s first solo museum presentation in the Washington, D.C., area, from 2021 to 2023. It brought video, sculpture, and photography into one 4,500-square-foot room and listed five works, with akingdoncomethas as the centerpiece. It was multidisciplinary, but it was a focused ensemble rather than a career survey across nearly forty years.

Most recently, the Museum of Modern Art gave Jafa a major New York platform with Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa—Less Is Morbid, on view from November 2025 to July 2026. Jafa selected more than eighty objects from MoMA’s collection and arranged them through affinities and collisions. There, he was the selector; at the New Museum, his own output is the historical subject. The distinction clarifies the role of curating: a large exhibition organized by an artist is not automatically a survey of that artist.

What makes I Am Tony genuinely comprehensive, then, is the conjunction of four features: a U.S. museum context, two full floors, a chronology reaching back to the earliest films, and the simultaneous treatment of moving images, photographs, sculptures, paintings, and installations. No single one of those features would establish the claim on its own.

 
 

The September 24 Opening Still Has Three Unsettled Works

The New Museum describes I Am Tony as Jafa’s first U.S. museum survey across the full breadth of his practice, opening September 24, although published closing dates conflict between January 3 and January 4. Louisiana’s archive shows that the earlier Magnumb was already a large, multidisciplinary presentation, so the New York show’s distinction is national and career-spanning rather than a claim that Jafa has never received a major survey.

The Times establishes that the installation remained deliberately unsettled ten days before opening: nine videos were reported, while More Real and the Michael Jackson video were still possible additions. Published schedules disagree: the New Museum’s program announcement and a September 4 Times guide list September 24–January 4, Cotter’s September 14 preview lists September 24–January 3, and Apollo lists September 25–January 4. The final placement of the new painting, new video, and reconstructed 2002 sculpture remains unknown until the installed checklist is released.