The New Museum has opened Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, a retrospective of the artist and filmmaker that opened to the public on September 24 and runs through January 3, 2027. Occupying the museum's third and fourth floors, it is described as the first US museum survey to bring together the full range of Jafa's practice, from film and photography to sculpture, painting and installation. The title honours the hugely influential jazz drummer Tony Williams. The exhibition gathers signature works including Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016), the rapid-fire montage set to Kanye West's Ultralight Beam, and The White Album (2019), alongside more recent and new pieces. Among them are akingdoncomethas (2018), a compilation of Black church culture; La Scala (2018), with Jafa as Mary Jones, a Black sex worker in 19th-century New York; AGHDRA, a digitally rendered black ocean that departs from his collagist mode; and BEN GAZARRA, his reworking of the violent ending of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. At the heart of the show are more than 200 archival binders of images Jafa has collected since his youth, from anonymous family photographs and magazine clippings to scans of album covers and advertising material. One spread pairs a Goodyear tire clipping with an ancient African totem; elsewhere a private-looking family photograph sits beside a celebrity portrait. Jafa has described the exhibition as closer to a record or a DJ set than a traditional survey, and the binders make the case: his art is an act of placement, of generating charge by putting one image beside another. Newer films fold in the language of the feed itself: TikToks, phone videos, goth LARPers and internet ephemera that would normally vanish in seconds are held on the museum screen long enough to be studied. The museum frames two forces in tension: the nation's growing awareness of institutional violence directed at the Black community, and the simultaneous ascension of Black culture, music and entertainment within American national identity. The survey runs alongside Diego Marcon's Arrivederci, Piggies!, on view from September 24 to January 31.