Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony

A career-spanning survey of the celebrated and resonant work of Arthur Jafa

Across his career, Arthur Jafa has sought to find new visual forms to capture the rhythm and realities of Black life in America. Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony is the most comprehensive survey of his work to date, spanning over four decades of his career and more than twenty-five acclaimed works.

Richly illustrated with 165 images representing the full breadth of the artist’s practice, including his films, videos, installations, photographs, and sculptures, this expansive publication includes Jafa’s most acclaimed works, such as the resounding Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) and the Golden Lion–winning The White Album (2018), as well as other impactful large-scale video and film installations and a range of sculptural and photographic objects.

In his early work as a cinematographer through his more recent video installations, Jafa has been gradually building a filmic language whose syncopations and textures match the aspirations of Black popular music. As part of this task, Jafa has built a staggering visual archive of images that cuts across histories and arenas of culture. This material is cut, collaged, montaged, and rearranged into 'affective proximities' that illuminate and unsettle the ways that race is communicated and experienced through contemporary media today.

Confrontational and deeply affecting, Jafa’s work turns an unflinching eye toward the darkness of the past while embodying and mirroring our contemporary obsession with mass images and 'content.' Through prolonged and thoughtful engagement with social media, internet culture, cinematic history, and popular music, Jafa wields an arsenal of images across his various working mediums, communicating both the realities and appearances of contemporary Black life, along with its mass consumption, through film, video, sculpture, photography, and large-scale installations. His acclaimed and resonant films have captured the collective imagination and experience of America amidst the nation’s growing awareness of the long history of institutional violence directed toward the Black community, placing this awakening against a backdrop of the century-long ascension of Black culture, music, and entertainment to the forefront of our national identity.

Accompanying a major solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York, the book includes an interview with Jafa by Massimiliano Gioni;  a roundtable discussion with Gary Carrion-Murayari, Ekow Eshun, Martine Syms, and Hamza Walker; and new contributions from preeminent scholars and writers, including Judith Butler, Mark Godfrey, J. Hoberman, Kara Keeling, Lawrence Rinder, and Simone White. Together, the exhibition and accompanying book will constitute the most comprehensive presentation, to date, of one of the most important and influential artists of this generation.

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.