iNew Museum · Bowery, Lower East Side
Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony
Jafa's inaugural US museum survey spans nearly four decades of work, including "Love is the Message, The Message is Death" and the Golden Lion-winning "The White Album," alongside new pieces exploring Black life in America.
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In a 1988 self-portrait, Jafa holds his camera to a mirror and stares upward, meeting his own reflected face and the viewer's gaze at once. He later retitled it Monster, and ARTnews critic Alex Greenberger reads that renaming as a way into the show: the Xenomorph from Alien, the creature from Cloverfield, Gollum and the Hulk all turn up in his work.
Curators Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari spread nearly four decades across two floors, mostly in near-darkness. Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, his best-known video, sits in a small side gallery where its song is barely audible over the other videos' screams and rumbles. Carrion-Murayari told Arts Fuse the show is "not only images of Black death and trauma; there's also images of Black creativity."
Admission is $25, with pay-what-you-wish hours on Thursday evenings. Two videos run long, AGHDRA at 1 hour 14 minutes and akingdoncomethas at 1 hour 45, so you won't see everything in one visit.
Editor's pick
The way in is "Monster", Arthur Jafa's 1988 self-portrait, and most of the two floors after it are near-dark. Love Is the Message gets a small side gallery; the film AGHDRA alone runs 74 minutes.
Look for
Monster
A 1988 self-portrait of Jafa pointing his camera at a mirror and looking up, so his reflection and the viewer's gaze meet.
MBD_Trans Am
A Pontiac Trans Am, part of it crushed and left beside the intact front half, with a booming sound that ARTnews calls both alluring and repellent.
Notebooks
A hallway of binders holding images cut from books and magazines; one pairs an MF DOOM album ad with a Cindy Sherman photograph of her in a silvery mask.
The Last Wave
A wall-filling mural where the Alien Xenomorph sits beside a solar eclipse, a New Order album cover, Michael Jackson performing and Billie Holiday in her coffin.
AGHDRA and the Picture Unit
In a large dim gallery, a computer-generated ocean full of broken rocks stutters and reverses, next to a walk-in maze whose walls are lined with images, including white eyes peering from a void.
Good for
- Going Solo
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You want a light visit: the show is dark, loud and full of images of racial violence.
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Image credits
5
- Arthur Jafa: I Am TonyCourtesy the artist and Gladstone
- Anna Maria Maiolino. ANNA—And the Infinite LineCourtesy of Hauser & Wirth
- Common SenseCourtesy of Brooklyn Museum
- Luminous ColorCourtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum
- New MuseumMusikAnimal, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0