For over three decades, Arthur Jafa (*1960) has produced imagery that reflects and dissects the realities, constructions, and influence of Blackness in contemporary culture – in America and beyond. Through strategies of appropriation as well as lyrical manipulations of industrial and other found materials, his films, paintings, sculptures and installations bring together disparate sources, revealing poignant gaps and connections between them through the power of juxtaposition, and asking viewers to witness alongside him the history, brutality and beauty of the Black experience.
Arthur Jafa. Photo: Melinda Nugent
Arthur Jafa
Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa – Less Is Morbid
The Museum of Modern Art – MoMA, New York
Through July 5, 2026
For this exhibition – the latest in MoMA’s Artist’s Choice series – Jafa has selected nearly 100 objects from the Museum’s collection. Placing things beside one another, he creates relationships between pictures and between their makers: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cy Twombly; Cady Noland and Mark Rothko; Lygia Clark, Roy DeCarava, and Piet Mondrian. Many of the works share an allover approach to composition in which the picture exceeds its physical frame. Seen together, the installation of works collapses typically opposed ideas and approaches – minimalist/maximalist, sparse/dense, atomic/cosmological, individual/collective – as well as the hierarchies that emerge from this kind of binary thinking.
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