Arthur Jafa's I Am Tony Fills Two Floors at the New Museum

Arthur Jafa has opened the largest exhibition of his work to date. I Am Tony, on view at the New Museum in New York, occupies two levels of the Lower Manhattan institution and stands as the most comprehensive survey yet of one of America's most important living artists.

The show is densely packed with work that ventures beyond the video art that made Jafa's reputation. It is full of the artist's characteristic gallows humor, which ironizes even the most morbid images and brings to the surface the solemnity of low culture. Its ambitions — which it achieves with mixed results — are to engage the same themes Jafa has continually mined, this time in even more idiosyncratic and brash ways. Those themes include the history of Black music, religion and secularity, American cinema, political violence, popular culture, and the Internet.

One floor opens onto the aptly titled "Allegiance" (2026), a wall-to-wall black-and-white image of a crowd of 19th-century Black schoolchildren performing what looks like a "Sieg Heil," while in the left quadrant a boyish flag-bearer stands. The stars and stripes confirm that, despite initial appearances, this is a blown-up piece of Americana: a vernacular photograph of a once neutral, outmoded ritual. The work has a grainy, spectral quality, and the way its young, somber subjects cluster in the frame produces a melancholic effect.

The wall text explains that this gesture was once a customary and patriotic way of honoring the flag. But it is what that same salute came to mean in a 20th-century European context that gives the piece its power — a power derived through shock, juxtaposition, and new connotations that become apparent out of context.

Another wallpaper, "Rwanda, 1999" (2026), reproduces a photograph Jafa took at the Murambi Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, five years after the atrocity it observes took place. The bloodied garments of the mass killing's victims are strewn across the entire museum wall.

It is impossible to view this work without thinking of the genocide in Gaza, and one imagines the evocation was intentional on Jafa's part — though the wall text does not explicitly mention Palestine.

A related edition of the image, "Allegiance" (1899, printed 2017), appears as wallpaper elsewhere in the installation, extending Jafa's long-running practice of monumentalizing found vernacular photography at architectural scale.

Taken together, the two wallpapers distill the exhibition's method: Jafa takes artifacts of American and global culture whose original meanings have expired or been buried, blows them up to overwhelming size, and lets their collision with the present do the work. Whether that method sustains itself across two full floors is the question the survey leaves open — and one that critics will weigh as the show remains on view downtown.