Based in Los Angeles for most of his career, Jafa was born and raised between Tupelo, Mississippi, and the Mississippi Delta, where he experienced the full spectrum of growing up Black in the American South. He attended Howard University, where he studied architecture and filmmaking – two strands that continue to shape his orchestrations of physical and cinematic space – and achieved early success as a cinematographer, including for the groundbreaking film Daughters of the Dust (1991), which he developed with his then partner, director Julie Dash, and was awarded Best Cinematographer at the Sundance Film Festival.

Though Jafa continued to work in film with the likes of John Akomfrah, Ava DuVernay, Stanley Kubrick and Spike Lee – notably on Lee’s 1995 film Crooklyn – the restrictions of the film industry, financially, creatively and socially, pushed him to pursue his expansive approach elsewhere. Early on, he envisioned the development of a Black visual culture as powerfully affective and influential as that of Black music, built from a sequencing and rhythm he conceived as “Black Intonation.” Jafa also began to compulsively collect found images and collage them into “notebooks,” voluminous binders dating from the 1990s to 2007 in which magazine clippings, advertisements, photographs and art reproductions coexist in deliberate pairings. Though catholic in their contents, the notebooks foreground Black history and cultural figures, all the while tapping into the early-twentieth-century montage theories of makers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield to generate their emotional and intellectual charge.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Jafa began to make short films and video installations that drew upon the notebooks’ imagery, and which were exhibited in institutional contexts, notably the 2000 Whitney Biennial. His tour-de-force APEX (2013), for example, brings together over 800 of his collated images to produce what he has called “a trailer for a film that doesn’t exist,” using formal and thematic pairings that gesture toward a narrative but remain always fluid and open.

In 2016, Jafa’s short film Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, whose operatic and overwhelming depictions of Black liberation and anti-Black violence are set to Kanye West’s anthem Ultralight Beam, was exhibited in dozens of museums and institutions and catapulted the artist to new levels of art world recognition. The White Album (2018), which earned Jafa the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennial, intersperses found footage of white people speaking performatively about race together with stunningly filmed portraits of the artist’s gallery team to explore the ever-present veil of whiteness over American society. Jafa has also added digital animation to his cinematic tools with AGHDRA (2021), creating an otherworldly landscape that connotes various surfaces and histories, including lava, Black skin and the Atlantic slave trade; BG (2024) also utilizes digital techniques to splice African American characters into Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, reworking the narrative to highlight the racial tension boiling below its surface.

In the last decade, Jafa’s practice has moved into the realm of painting and sculpture, including his “Big Wheel” series of massive tires covered in intricate chains, as well as his freestanding printed metallic “Cutouts,” which act as both prop pieces and stand-ins for figures that have shaped the artist’s singular vision. In his recent paintings, he generates new assemblages from his vast image bank, connecting them through thick passages of impasto. Always unflinching and eloquent in their portrayal of Black cultural production, Jafa’s works across media continually expand the dialogues of contemporary art with force and urgency.