Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago proudly announces Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection. Culled mostly from the MCA’s holdings, which features one of the largest collections of Arthur Jafa’s work, the exhibition surveys Jafa’s artistic practice over roughly the last ten years.

Known for his use of found imagery, music, and artistic techniques such as montage and collage, Jafa constructs works that are layered and arranged in ways that reveal the diverse and complex realities of Black being. Through this process he seeks to encompass what he describes as “the full complexity, specificity, beauty, and potentiality of what Black folks have made and continue to make out of the bleak existential circumstance we’ve attended to over the past several hundred years.”

This immersive exhibition features four of Jafa’s video works—APEX (2013), Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016), The White Album (2018), and Akingdoncomethas (2018). Linked together through connecting corridors, the exhibition intends to envelop the viewer in Jafa’s broad range of references, subjects, and themes. Accompanying the videos are key sculptural and photographic works that further underscore Jafa’s unique approach to visual culture and image making, in which the lines between popular and high culture blur and the personal collides with the political.

Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection opens on June 1, 2024, and runs through March 2, 2025. It is organized by René Morales, former James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator.