Arthur Jafa
A guide to the moving image artists that move culture.
Who is Arthur Jafa?
Arthur Jafa is a visual artist, filmmaker and cinematographer. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1960 to parents who were both educators, he was raised in Clarksdale during a time of heightened segregation. He finished studies in architecture and film at Howard University in Washington DC under the tutelage of Dr. Abiyi Ford and the great filmmaker Haile Gerima, before moving to Atlanta for a brief period and then to Los Angeles, where he set his sights on filmmaking. After collaborating with Julie Dash on the historically significant film Daughters of the Dust, he worked with directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay.
The conceptual parameters of Jafa’s artistic practice
Many of the main ideas which inform Jafa's artistic practice coalesced during his childhood in Mississippi. His penchant for using collages of images in his video installations began with his childhood collections of found images, which he stored in binders he called “the books.” Other formative influences from that stage of his life include the television show I Spy and the burgeoning sci-fi culture of the 1960s. His contrasting experiences of the tension between segregation and desegregation in the American South were formative for his awareness of and engagement with the Black American experience.
Jafa's sharp attention to detail enables him to utilize the irreconcilable yet connected fragments of found images that he collects to piece together a formal construct that dissects the realities, constructions and influence of Blackness in American culture and abroad. Jafa's concern for the visual aspects of African American culture and its place within the broader context of American culture also addresses what he terms “the Black experience… [being] this complex of majesty and misery that are inextricably bound up.” His work encompasses film, painting, sculpture and installation.
Jafa's position in the contemporary art world
Arthur Jafa achieved early success as a cinematographer in Los Angeles during the 1990s, though he quickly perceived that the restrictive nature of the film industry did not permit the flourishing of his distinctive notion of a Black visual culture that could have the same power and affective pull of Black music. From the 1990s through 2007 he collected binders full of magazine clippings, advertisements, photographs and art reproductions which he drew upon in making his short films and videos.
The second half of the 2000s saw Jafa's works being exhibited and included in the collections of major American and European museums, such as: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin; Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Moderna Museet in Stockholm and many others.
Awards and recognitions attained
Jafa first achieved recognition as a cinematographer for his work on the trailblazing film Daughters of the Dust (1991), for which he received the Best Cinematography Award at Sundance Film Festival. He participated in the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 and won the festival's top award, the Golden Lion, for his video installation The White Album. In the same year, Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco awarded him the 2019 Prix International d’Art Contemporain – worth €75,000 – for his haunting masterpiece Love is the Message, The Message Is Death.
Past and ongoing projects
Jafa's work on the film Daughters of the Dust brought him into the spotlight of the art world, attracting the attention of prominent filmmakers, singers and songwriters, with whom he cooperated on a number of films and music videos. These include the likes of Solange Knowles, Jay-Z, and Kanye West.
As a cinematographer he has worked on a number of standout film projects, including: Spike Lee's Crooklyn (1995), Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), John Akomfrah's Seven Songs for Malcolm X (2009), and the television documentary Killing Me Softly: The Roberta Flack Story (2014). In recent years Jafa has made his mark in the disciplines of painting and sculpture, for example with his Big Wheel series and Cutout metallic sculpture. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is presenting a retrospective of Jafa’s work.
Where to find more info on Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa is represented by Gladstone Gallery and Sprüth Magers. He has an account on Instagram, where he posts sporadically.