Tony on the Bowery, Arthur Jafa's I Am Tony Fills the New Museum
Two floors of the expanded museum hold nearly four decades of Jafa's films, paintings and sculpture, with Thursday nights open until nine
Somewhere on the Bowery a young man is holding a camera up to a mirror. That is *Monster*, a self-portrait Arthur Jafa made in 1988, and the New Museum calls it a prelude to everything that came after.
Everything that came after now fills the third and fourth floors at 235 Bowery. Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony is the largest museum survey of his work to date. It opened September 24 and runs through January 3, 2027.
The timing helps. The September openings are behind us, and a show built from moving images in dim rooms suits a night out.
What Fills the Floors
The museum says the show follows Jafa across a career of nearly forty years, from his earliest films to recent video installations. There is new work, along with recent paintings, large-scale video and film installations, and sculptural and photographic objects.
The headline pieces are there. *Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death* (2016) is on the list, along with *The White Album* (2019), the video essay about whiteness that won him the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.
*Love Is the Message* runs about seven minutes and is set to Kanye West's "Ultralight Beam." The Amsterdam News places it in the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement. ARTnews notes that Jafa slips two movie monsters into it, the creature from *Cloverfield* laying waste to New York and the Xenomorph from *Alien*.
The title belongs to a drummer. Tony Williams, the Boston-raised player best known for Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet, is the namesake, as Robert Israel notes in the Arts Fuse. The museum says Jafa's filmic language borrows its syncopations and textures from the aspirations of Black popular music.
Before the art, there was the camera. Jafa first made his name as a cinematographer, working with Julie Dash, Stanley Kubrick and Spike Lee, according to the museum.
ARTnews calls the early work the great revelation of the show. *Notebooks*, a run of binders stuffed with images torn from books and magazines, gets a hallway of its own. *APEX* (2013) flashes 841 images across eight and a half minutes. Hypebeast describes *AGHDRA* as a digitally rendered black ocean, a long way from his collage work. The same review points to *akingdoncomethas* (2018), a compilation of sermons and performances from Black church culture, and *BEN GAZARRA*, which reworks the violent ending of *Taxi Driver*.
A show about images asks you to sit in the dark with them.
The Critics Weigh In
The reviews are admiring, with reservations.
ARTnews calls the survey "exquisite" and argues that it makes a fair case for reading Jafa's art as a horror show. It also notes that the exhibition largely sets aside his cinema career, focuses on his visual art and presents it out of chronological order.
At Hyperallergic, Stephanie Wambugu finds the gallows humor and the intuitive grasp of memes and virality that set Jafa apart. She also says the show's ambitions land with mixed results.
Museum director Massimiliano Gioni, who curated the show with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Calvin Wang, was warm at a media preview. "It's not only an honor and a privilege to be able to present this exhibition," he said, according to the Amsterdam News. He likes to call shows like this one introspectives rather than retrospectives.
What to Know Before You Go
The New Museum is at 235 Bowery and is closed Mondays. According to its visit page, it opens at 11am Tuesday through Sunday and closes at 6pm, except Thursdays, when it stays open until 9pm. Admission is pay what you wish from 7 to 9pm on Thursdays. Those tickets must be reserved online in advance, with a limited number offered on site. Adult admission is otherwise $28.
The next Thursday is October 15.
Other shows are open in the building. The museum lists Diego Marcon's *Arrivederci, Piggies!*, the Hyundai Translocal Series with Ho Tzu Nyen, and *The Bowery: Devil's Mile*, which we covered in our look at the neighborhood show.
The catalog, co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon, holds 165 images and new writing from contributors including Judith Butler and Martine Syms. The museum store sells it for $79.95.
Jafa's rooms stay dim on purpose. Out on the Bowery, the streetlights do the rest.
