Arthur Jafa. Untitled notebook. 1990–2007. Printed papers, ink, and pencil on paper, cut-and-arranged in plastic sleeves in a three-ring binder, overall (binder): 11 5/8 × 10 15/16 × 2 13/16" (29.5 × 27.8 × 7.1 cm); sheet (each approx.): 11 5/16 × 9 1/4" (28.7 × 23.5 cm). Gift of Jack Shear. © 2024 Arthur Jafa

“I’m really not manipulating the images, I’m manipulating the gap in between the images.”

The late cultural critic Greg Tate described his longtime friend Arthur Jafa as having an “obsession with witnessing through images.”1 Jafa’s relentless gaze draws chaos and dissonance into focus. As a visual artist and filmmaker, he collages images and ideas taken from history, fine art, and popular culture, bringing the viewer into a world of harmonious yet strange sequences and creating a lens configured for the cultural nuances of the Black experience.

Jafa’s keen eye for irreconcilable yet connected fragments was influenced by his upbringing in the Mississippi Delta region during the end of the Civil Rights Movement. He has described his childhood as a cross between the cheery 1970s family sitcom The Brady Bunch and Alice Walker’s intense coming-of-age novel The Color Purple. The contrasting circumstances that marked Jafa’s early years echo in his work, which refuses a singular message but instead welcomes the possibility of multiplicity and disquiet.

In APEX, an eight-minute video set to electronic music by Robert Hood, Jafa reproduces images that include artist Glenn Ligon’s artwork Hands—which depicts hands raised at the 1995 Million Man March demonstration in Washington, DC—alongside stills from the blockbuster science fiction film Avatar and Michael Jackon’s 1982 music video for “Thriller.” Out of these sequences emerges an encyclopedia of Black visual culture bound together by themes of alienation, heroism, villainy, and horror.

In 1991, Jafa made his debut as a cinematographer with Daughters of the Dust, in which he, alongside director Julie Dash and production designer Kerry James Marshall, portrayed the intricacies of Blackness and its inextricable relation to the trauma of slavery. They dyed the hands of the actors blue, to illustrate slavery’s lasting legacy of violence upon the Gullah people, who were forced to grow indigo in the Carolina Sea Islands, and procured a Technicolor film stock to convey the full chromatic spectrum of Black peoples’ skin tones.2 Jafa’s work offers a visualization of his belief that “the Black experience is this complex of majesty and misery that are inextricably bound up.”3

While Jafa’s work crisscrosses the worlds of art, film, and music, he consistently taps into the power of association. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, Jafa carried around his notebooks, which were filled with magazine and newspaper cutouts arranged in unlikely combinations, such as images of Mickey Mouse and Sojourner Truth intermingled with pictures of insects and astronomical phenomena. “I’m really not manipulating the images, I’m manipulating the gap in between the images,” Jafa has said.4

In Jafa’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016), viewers encounter myriad visual elements, including photographs of civil rights leaders and politicians, a video clip of tennis player Serena Williams Crip Walking on the court, and camera phone footage of police brutality against Black people—all interspersed with close-ups of the sun. Though the sequences of images seem to defy logic, the frames are cut and spliced rhythmically, producing a choreographed procession of anti-Black violence, mourning, celebration, and intimacy—all inhabiting the immensity and power of the sun.

Arthur Jafa’s eye continually seeks out, and draws into focus, unlikely and uncanny companions. Through his work he invites viewers to look along with him, not turning away but bearing witness to a chorus of beauty and terror that, for Jafa, define the richness of Black life.

Kennedy Jones, Black Arts Council 12-Month Intern, Department of Media and Performance Art, 2024

Note: Opening quote is from Arthur Jafa, “Interview: Arthur Jafa,” by Cassie da Costa, Film Comment, May 8, 2017.

  1. Arthur Jafa and Greg Tate, “Arthur Jafa & Greg Tate” (conversation, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, June 14, 2016).

  2. Keeling, Kara. “Black Cinema and Questions Concerning Film/Media/Technology.” In Queer Times, Black Futures, 30: 138. NYU Press, 2019.

  3. “Arthur Jafa: APEX | ARTIST STORIES”, Modern Museum of Art, December 3, 2019.

  4. Arthur Jafa, “Interview: Arthur Jafa,” by Cassie da Costa, Film Comment, May 8, 2017.

Works

6 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

  • Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 184 pages
  • Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces Exhibition catalogue, Paperback, 184 pages
  • Among Others: Blackness at MoMA Hardcover, 488 pages

Media

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