
In the wing and Opatrny Galleries, Floor 2L
Arthur Jafa’s 2016 video Love is the Message, The Message is Death is an exploration of Black identity, history, and culture in America. The video, set to Kanye West’s gospel-inspired track “Ultralight Beam,” uses a rapidly edited montage of mostly found footage to convey the complexities of Black life in the United States, including images of civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., moments of Black cultural achievement, as well as disturbing clips of police violence against Black people.
Jafa carefully arranges these visuals to create a sense of emotional intensity, highlighting both the beauty and trauma embedded in the Black experience. The music amplifies this emotional tone, blending gospel and hip-hop to heighten the video’s spiritual and social resonance. The montage shifts from moments of pride and joy to those of grief and anger, capturing a spectrum of Black life marked by both achievement and suffering.
When the film was shown in 2017 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, then-curator Helen Molesworth (Cornell PhD 1997) noted that the work “suspends viewers” in an emotional state, forcing them to confront the contradictions and struggles that define Black lives. The video’s powerful imagery and music offer a meditation on both the history and present-day realities of race in America, making it a poignant and impactful piece on contemporary society.
This presentation at the Johnson Museum was organized by Andrea Inselmann, the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and supported in part by the Ames Exhibition Endowment.
Images: Arthur Jafa (American, born 1960), Love is the Message, The Message is Death, 2016 (stills). Single-channel digital video (color, sound); 7:25 min. © Arthur Jafa, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery