The New York Exhibitions Worth Seeing During Art Week NYC

• The New Museum
• Through January 3, 2027

Spanning two floors of the museum’s newly expanded building, “I Am Tony” is the first U.S. museum survey to encompass the full breadth of Jafa’s nearly four-decade practice. Bringing together some of his most memorable works, such as Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and the Golden Lion-winning The White Album (2019), alongside new productions, paintings, sculptures, photographs and large-scale video installations, the exhibition offers an immersive encounter with one of the most compelling visual languages of our time. Through his reworking of images drawn from cinema, social media, popular culture and the internet, Jafa examines the complexities and contradictions of Black life in America, confronting the historical representation and mediation of racial violence while celebrating the extraordinary cultural force of Black music and imagery. His practice unfolds as a rigorous semiological exercise, deconstructing and analyzing, fragment by fragment, the visual elements that build these narratives, exposing their underlying structures and illuminating how images shape collective memory, identity and the ways we see one another.