Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago today announced the upcoming exhibition Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection. Opening on June 1, 2024, and running through March 2, 2025 in the Neil and Fischel Galleries on the museum’s second floor, the exhibition pulls from the MCA collection, which holds one of the largest collections of Jafa’s work, to create a survey of his artistic practice over roughly the last ten years.

This immersive exhibit features four video works, linked together by connecting corridors, that envelope the viewer in the broad range of Jafa’s references, subjects, and themes. The exhibition explores Jafa’s use of found imagery, music, and artistic techniques such as montage and collage to construct videos, sculptures, and photographic works that are layered and arranged in ways that reveal the diverse and complex realities of Black being. Jafa’s multidisciplinary work 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.”

Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection contains a selection of artworks held in the MCA’s collection, including the videos APEX (2013), Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016)—last seen in the MCA’s 2019 exhibition Prisoner of Love— The White Album (2018), and Akingdoncomethas (2018). 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 is organized by René Morales, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator.

Lead support is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Zell Family Foundation, and Cari and Michael Sacks.

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, MS; lives in Los Angeles, CA) is an artist and filmmaker. 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 of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Luma Foundation, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Image: Arthur Jafa, Mickey Mouse was a Scorpio, 2017. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminum; 52 × 83 in. (132.1 × 210.8 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift of Marilyn and Larry Fields, 2023.61. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.