Arthur Jafa’s I Am Tony Asks What Images Carry Across Time

Arthur Jafa’s I Am Tony arrives at the New Museum as the artist’s most comprehensive survey to date. On view through January 3, 2027, the exhibition offers a timely reason to consider Jafa not only as a maker of individual works, but as an artist who asks how images gather force when they move between cinema, photography, sculpture, music, news, and memory.

A practice built across forms

Jafa is an artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer whose practice spans film, photography, sculpture, and installation. That range is not simply a list of media. It is a method for testing how scale, sequencing, sound, and context can change the meaning of an image.

The New Museum describes the survey as an effort to trace Jafa’s search for visual forms adequate to the realities of Black life in America. That framing gives viewers a useful entry point: watch for the tension between images made for intimate attention and images already carrying public histories. Ask what happens when something familiar is enlarged, slowed, isolated, or placed beside material from another time.

Look at the edit, not only the image

Jafa’s importance to moving-image culture also comes through cinematography. He served as cinematographer on Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, and the museum’s related December program pairs a screening of that film with a conversation between Jafa and cinematographer Bradford Young. The connection matters because cinematography is never only about capturing what is in front of a lens. Framing, duration, texture, and rhythm determine how a viewer encounters a body, a landscape, or a historical inheritance.

That is a useful way to approach the exhibition even without specialized art vocabulary. Notice when the work makes you wait. Notice when sound changes the emotional temperature of an image. Notice what is absent from the frame and what your own memory supplies.

Why the survey matters now

Images circulate faster than their contexts. A clip can cross platforms, audiences, and political meanings in hours. Jafa’s work has long treated circulation as more than a distribution problem: it is a question of power. Who creates the image? Who is represented? Who controls the sequence? What histories remain visible when an image is detached from its source?

I Am Tony does not need to function as a neat retrospective with one conclusion. Its value lies in making those questions physical and sustained. For filmmakers, photographers, editors, and designers, the exhibition is also a reminder that formal choices are ethical choices. Cropping, repetition, juxtaposition, and sound do not merely decorate meaning; they produce it.

Visitors should use the museum’s current exhibition page to confirm hours and ticket details before traveling. The most productive way to enter may be with one simple question: what is this image asking me to carry forward?

Sources: New Museum exhibition listing and New Museum fall 2026 public-program announcement.