May 6 — June 18, 2021
New York: 64th Street
The host of unlikely marriages, transposed identities, and disparate doppelgangers that populate Arthur Jafa’s oeuvre come to full clarity in his new body of sculptures. Composed of industrial materials such as rubber tubing, aluminum beams, and steel pipes that are embellished with lengths of fur, chains, feathers and languidly draped bags, these objects reckon with the instrumentalization of the black body while shielding it with sartorial excess. Alluding to what Jafa calls “glamouring,” these sculptures simultaneously reference the burdensome machinations of double consciousness while also contending with the duplicity synonymous with glamour itself.
Installation
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About
Photo by Robert Hamacher
Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist, filmmaker and cinematographer. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent “power, beauty and alienation” embedded within forms of Black music in US culture?
Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals, and his artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Tate, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The High Museum Atlanta, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Stedelijk, Luma Foundation, The Perez Art Museum Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
Select recent institutional solo exhibitions include MCA Chicago, Illinois (2024); OGR Torino, Italy (2022); LUMA Foundation, Arles, France (2022); Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland (2021); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk, Denmark (2021); Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2020); Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Canada (2020); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2019). In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale “May You Live in Interesting Times.”
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