Arthur Jafa began his career as a cameraman, shooting Julie Dash’s influential feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) and working as second-unit cinematographer on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Since then he has made a name for himself as a video artist and a perceptive theorist. ‘The relationship between camera placements is tied to eurocentrism, which is really egocentrism,’ he told the curator June Givanni in 1993. ‘That logic system is very much tied into Renaissance perspective, vanishing points and a way of looking at the world which says, “I am at the centre of the universe.”’ In 2019 Jafa won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for The White Album – a half-hour video work about whiteness, music and the porousness of racial distinctions, and one of several experiments in translating the textures and rhythms of Black music into a visual medium. This exhibition at the New Museum is Jafa’s largest retrospective to date, bringing together not just film but also recent paintings as well as sculpture and photography (25 September–4 January 2027).
Find out more from the New Museum’s website.
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