Sequencing the Notes
Arthur Jafa
At 52 Walker, a gallery in New York City, iconic figures like Miles Davis, Adrian Piper, and Michel Foucault are carefully arranged to form artist Arthur Jafa’s Large Array II (2024), a collage of aluminum cutouts highlighting unexpected relationships between Blackness and punk rock, critical theory, comic books, and more. Throughout his practice, Jafa appropriates materials mined from the entirety of American culture, ranging from iconic films and photographs to videos posted on social media, sequencing and juxtaposing them to reveal qualities, connections, and absences that otherwise remain unseen. “A lot of what I do is structured free association,” says the artist. “That’s a fundamental thing I’m interested in. That very specific and local ‘Big Bang’ that happens when you put one Black being next to another Black being. What is engendered by that?” In this documentary short, we watch Jafa explore the rich landscape of Black cultural production by identifying and utilizing Black methodologies and aesthetics, uncovering the nuances of Black identity.
This film was directed by Jurrell Lewis, edited by Winnie Cheung, and filmed by Sean Hanley, Travis LaBella, and Jane Macedo Yang.
Featured artists
About the artists
Arthur Jafa was born in 1960 in Tupelo, Mississippi, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. The artist received his BA from Howard University in 1983. Engaging strategies of appropriation, Jafa’s practice reinterprets and recontextualizes objects of American culture to highlight and explore Black aesthetics, approaches, and contributions. Using films, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and installations: the artist brings together materials from varied cultural contexts, creating something new in his sequencing and juxtaposition of them. Through his work, Jafa explores the conditions that construct Blackness, how Blackness is expressed, and what it means to be Black.
