Arthur Jafa

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. 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.