Celebrated Artist Arthur Jafa Featured in Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter Lecture

For years, Arthur Jafa’s work as a filmmaker, artist, and cinematographer has encapsulated, examined, and questioned the cultural history and expression of “Black being” in profound, disruptive forms of visual media. On February 8, 2024, Jafa joined Kellie Jones, Chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and Hans Hofmann, Professor of Modern Art, for a conversation in Columbia University School of the Arts’s Lenfest Center for the Arts.

The event was part of the Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter Lecture Series, an ongoing program in the African American and Diaspora Studies Department that aims to provide fresh perspectives on campus by highlighting noteworthy contributors to African American and African Diaspora Studies and facilitating thought-provoking public discussions.

“The series features some of the most innovative thinkers, artists, and public servants,” said Jafari S. Allen, Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Director of The Institute for Research in African American Studies, during his introductory remarks. “This year, we are honored to welcome artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa as our distinguished speaker. Across three decades, Jafa has built a dynamic practice comprising film, artifacts, and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practices is a recurring question: How can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent power, beauty, and alienation embedded within forms of Black music in U.S. culture?”

Jones and Jafa began by discussing some of the artist’s best-known works, centering on his 2016 video, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death. A collage of Black life in America, set to Kanye West’s gospel-inspired song, “Ultralight Beam,” the video includes material from documentary film, news media, social media, and Hollywood to evoke years of Black experiences in the United States. The montage moves between scenes of differing emotional registers, depicting violence, grief, joy, and triumph while showing audiences the cultural, political, and aesthetic achievements embedded within a national identity. In 2020, Jones said, 13 museums screened the work for 48 hours across the U.S. and Europe.

Love Is the Message captures Jafa’s instinct to avoid “tidy” formulations and tidy phenomena. “I’m interested in that part of who we are that’s unspoken and unarticulated and unacknowledged—sometimes unknown—that’s powering what we do,” he said. 

Even in his early thirties, Jafa explained, he kept returning to the desire to make something about Black music. “It’s not necessarily because music is the only thing we’ve done—no, it’s not,” Jafa said. “I think to a certain degree, it’s a measure of our humanity. There’s more depth, virtuosity, and diversity of expression in that particular arena. We know that when you see that arena, it’s unmatched. [In music] we see complex, sophisticated, deep, diverse renderings of who we are.”

Across his body of work, Jafa references and reuses a number of different photographs, films, and found materials, and includes audio and visual clips of speeches and songs made by Black scholars, artists, and activists. In his shows, he said, he often strives to include pieces from other artists. To Jafa, Black visual culture and music are “ultimately expansive, almost quantum” in their breadth. 

“People have said, ‘Oh, it’s so nice that you did that,’ [but] it’s not altruism to me,” Jafa said. “It’s about elevating the collective, ‘kumbaya’ kind of thing, but it’s also measuring yourself against the best that’s out there. I’m constantly feeling like I’m trying to challenge myself.”

Jones also made note of Jafa’s part in the 2014 group exhibition Ruffneck Constructivists, curated by artist Kara Walker for the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia. In addition to Jafa’s work, the exhibition featured sculpture, photography and video by the artists Dineo Seshee Bopape '10, Kendell Geers, Jennie C. Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Rodney McMillian, Pope.L, Tim Portlock, Lior Shvil, and Szymon Tomsia.

Jones read Walker’s remarks on the exhibition out loud to audience members. “‘The assembled ‘Ruffnecks’ are artists who challenge us in many respects, refusing orderly categorization, subverting conceptual subversions, upending propriety, and throwing right hooks at even the most well-meaning curatorial intentions,’” she read. “‘The work in this show doesn’t communicate straight politics. They don’t agitate for social change or advocate solutions. The show is not ‘balanced.’ There is no evenness. There are no works that directly address overcrowded prison systems, stop-and-frisk, or other forms of racial profiling: poverty, apartheid, and crumbling social services. This is not a ‘hopey changey’ show, yet that is the background hum. Ruffneck Constructivists takes as given that art doesn’t need to be told how to behave.’”

“I like a lot of what Kara was saying,” Jafa said before elaborating on his inclination toward works that defy straightforward classification, describing his curiosity about their inherent complexities. 

“I’m drawn to things that escape easy categorization,” Jafa said. “There’s something about the irreconcilability. You can’t separate what’s magnificent and what’s miserable. I’m interested in that kind of discrepancy and how we exist in that discrepancy.”

Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York, and Black Star Film Festivals, and his artwork is represented in renowned collections worldwide including at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, High Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, MCA Chicago, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Luma Foundation, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. In 2019, Jafa received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant at the 58th Venice Biennale. He opens a new show at the Tribeca gallery space, 52 Walker, in April.