Arthur Jafa

After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.

A tribute to the controversial black activist and leader of the struggle for black liberation. He hit bottom during his imprisonment in the '50s, he became a Black Muslim and then a leader in the Nation of Islam. His assassination in 1965 left a legacy of self-determination and racial pride.

From Spike Lee comes this vibrant semi-autobiographical portrait of a school-teacher, her stubborn jazz-musician husband and their five kids living in '70s Brooklyn.

Martin Scorsese traces the roots of the blues from the Mississippi Delta back to West Africa, journeying from the juke joints of Mississippi to the banks of the Niger River in Mali. Featuring performances by Corey Harris, Taj Mahal, Keb’ Mo’, and Ali Farka Touré, along with rare archival footage of blues legends like Son House and Muddy Waters, the film offers a lyrical portrait of the music’s deep African origins.

In 1902, a Gullah family on the Sea Islands off South Carolina decide whether to migrate to the mainland, risking their unique cultural heritage.

The Black Audio Film Collective’s seventh film envisioned the death and life of the African American revolutionary as a seven part study in iconography as narrated by novelist Toni Cade Bambara and actor Giancarlo Espesito. The stylized tableaux vivants that memorialise Malcolm’s life referenced the early 20th century funeral photography of James Van der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and the elemental static cinematography of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.

A young African-American man, living in Los Angeles without direction in his life, reluctantly agrees to be the best man for his brother, an upwardly mobile lawyer.

Numa Perrier reimagines the story and moments in a distinct photograph of her mother. What results is a complex merging of memory, absence, and imagery set against the backdrop of Port Au Prince, Haiti.

Shadows of Liberty presents the phenomenal true story of today's disintegrating freedoms within the U.S. media, and government, that they don't want you to see. The film takes an intrepid journey through the darker corridors of the American media landscape, where global media conglomerates exercise extraordinary political, social, and economic power. The overwhelming collective power of these firms raises troubling questions about democracy. Highly revealing interviews, actuality, and archive material, tell insider accounts of a broken media system, where journalists are prevented from pursuing controversial news stories, people are censored for speaking out against abuses of government power, and individual lives are shattered as the arena for public expression has been turned into a private profit zone

Fifty years after Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, a collective of African American filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals reflect on the goals and ambitions of the civil rights movement and where things stand today.

“Draw or Die” is the divine imperative received by the painter, Hannah, who is being nurtured by her Grandmother, but controlled by her pragmatic mother. When her Granny spirit shouts this command to Hannah, she closes a celebration of personal visions in a dance piece that is close to visionary in itself.

A reflection on Jafa's desire to craft a "black cinema" that is responsive to the "existential, political, and spiritual dimensions" of Black life. Comprised of found footage sampled from films, newscasts, sporting events, music videos, and citizen videos, all of it downloaded from the Internet, the clips have been woven together and set to Kanye West's anthem "Ultralight Beam." Together the images and music make for an intense, poignant meditation on African American life in the twentieth-century. This history is also the history, by necessity, of racism and prejudice.

Jafa has asked, at what scale should we consider the lives of Black Americans? For over thirty years—starting while he worked as a cinematographer—Jafa has compiled notebooks with clippings from a broad array of sources. His notebooks, facsimiles of which are on view nearby, are repositories of references and ideas that serve as reminders of the depth and beauty of Black life in America. While each image is drawn from a particular context, together they convey the shared vocabularies and collaborative procedures the artist considers central to Black cultural production. In the immersive video APEX, on view through this corridor, Jafa organizes a fast-paced sequence of images. Set to a driving soundtrack of electronic club beats, APEX creates pairings and contrasts whereby heroes and villains, history and present all become enmeshed in what Jafa has termed “spooky entanglements.”

The career of iconic and influential poet and writer Audre Lorde is seen up until death.

Shot in the span of ten years, Black August Hip-Hop Project takes us to New York City, Cuba, and South Africa to raise awareness about political prisoners in the United States and abroad. The documentary features interviews with intellectuals and social activists including Assata Shakur, as well as performances by artists such as Talib Kweli, Mos Def, David Banner, Dead Prez, and Common.

If Love Is The Message trained Jafa’s scrutiny on black experience, The White Album shifts his lens to white experience, acknowledging that neither can be understood in isolation from the another. Again, he combines imagery from a wide array of sources, from music videos to confessionals posted to YouTube, to produce a trenchant examination of race relations in the United States.

A striking music-driven 8-minute video work proposes a vibrant scenario in which the histories drawn from the African American narrative of Blackness bear universal significance.

Centers on two performances; in the first, dancers Storyboard P and Okwui Okpokwasili twist and twine their bodies in a moving two-part dance of desire, pain, and regret. In the second, present-day hip-hop royalty Beyoncé and Jay-Z serenade each other as part of a live performance. The work accompanies Jay-Z's track of the same name, widely viewed as an apology to his wife, Beyoncé for his infidelity and emotional failures as a husband. A collaboration between Arthur Jafa, Malik Sayeed, and Baltimore-based Elissa Blount Moorhead, the video uses cinematography, choreography, and found footage to explore complex and constricted notions of masculinity in an insightful and moving tapestry of Black love and life.

Ishmael Huston-Jones physically carries his mother, Pauline Jones, into the improvisational dance space. While she dyes eggs and speaks about family history, he improvises a rhythmic dance-counterpoint to her speech.

It's a hot summer day in June 1969. Marsha plans a birthday party for herself, but no one shows up. Sylvia, Marsha's best friend, suggests they meet at Stonewall instead, where Marsha can perform. When the police arrive to raid the bar, Marsha is among the first to fight back.

Malian filmmaker and New York University professor, Manthia Diawara critiques visual anthropology through the work of Jean Rouch.

Personal pilgrimages to three sites of extreme creativity, invention, and generosity: Alice Coltrane's Ashram, Watts Towers, and Watervliet Shaker Community

Commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (October 9, 2022-February 18, 2023).

Music: Jeff Mills "Medicine Man"

The Blues (2003) is a seven-part documentary series produced by Martin Scorsese that explores the history and influence of blues music. Each episode, directed by a different filmmaker, traces a unique aspect of the genre’s evolution—from its African roots to its global impact. Originally airing on PBS, the series includes Scorsese’s Feel Like Going Home, Wim Wenders’ The Soul of a Man, Richard Pearce’s The Road to Memphis, Charles Burnett’s Warming by the Devil’s Fire, Marc Levin’s Godfathers and Sons, Mike Figgis’ Red, White and Blues, and Clint Eastwood’s Piano Blues.