Arthur Jafa Biography
Arthur Jafa is an African American video artist, cinematographer, filmmaker and visual artist since the early 1990s. A large part of his oeuvre addresses black lives in the West.
Arthur Jafa Early Life
Jafa was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and as a child, he assembled binders full of found images in collections he called “the books,” which informed his artistic practice as an adult.
Arthur Jafa Education
He went to Howard University where he studied architecture and film before moving to Atlanta, Georgia
Arthur Jafa Career
Arthur Jafa has shown at the Hirshhorn, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Julia Stoschek Collection, just as numerous others. His job as a cinematographer with chiefs, for example, Julie Dash and Spike Lee have been prominent, with his work on Daughters of the Dust (1991) winning the “Best Cinematography” Award at Sundance.
His seven-minute video article Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death is in the accumulations of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the High Museum of Art. Set to Kanye West’s tune “Ultralight Beam”, the work comprises of a progression of discovered pictures and video clasps portraying a scope of Black American encounters since the beginning.
Among numerous different clasps investigating African American life and flexibility, the video article compares accounts of police viciousness and film from the Civil Rights Movement with clasps of Black masterfulness, popular culture, festivity, and innovativeness.
Jafa additionally has dealt with various music recordings and was outstandingly the chief of photography on recordings for Solange’s Don’t Touch My Hair and Cranes in the Sky. He was incorporated into the 2017 ArtReview Power 100 rundown.
Arthur Jafa helped to establish TNEG alongside Malik Sayeed, a “film studio whose objective is to make a dark film as socially, socially, and financially key to the 21st century as was dark music to the twentieth century”.
TNEG has delivered various works, for example, Dreams Are Colder Than Death and the music video for Jay-Z’s tune 4:44. In 2018, Jafa discharged the roughly forty-moment long video article entitled The White Album, which uses discovered video cuts from CC TV, mobile phones, documentaries, and more to investigate whiteness and bigotry in the United States of America. His work is spoken to by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. He was granted the Golden Lion for best craftsman at the 2019 Venice Biennale for his film “The White Album”.
Arthur Jafa Age
He celebrates his birthday on the 30th of every November. He was born in the year 1960.
Arthur Jafa Family
After doing our research, details about his parents are not available and it is also not known if he has any siblings.
Arthur Jafa Wife
Jafa likes to keep his personal life private hence information about his dating life is not available. It is therefore not known whether he is married or has any children. However, this information will be updated as soon as it is available.
Arthur Jafa Body Measurements
- Height: NOT AVAILABLE
- Weight: NOT AVAILABLE
- Shoe Size: NOT AVAILABLE
- Body Shape: NOT AVAILABLE
- Hair Colour: NOT AVAILABLE
Arthur Jafa Salary
Details about Arthur’s salary are not yet disclosed. However, information about how much he makes will be updated as soon as it is available.
Arthur Jafa Net Worth
Working as a video artist, cinematographer, filmmaker and visual artist, there is no doubt Arthur earns a good salary and has been able to accumulate good net worth. However, his exact net worth has not yet been revealed but the information will be updated as soon as it is available.
Arthur Jafa Love Is The Message
Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death is another video by craftsman, executive, and grant-winning cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Set to the burning highs and lows of Kanye West’s gospel-motivated hip-jump track, “Ultralight Beam,” Love Is The Message is a marvelous combination of discovered film that follows African-American personality through an immense range of contemporary symbolism.
From photos of social liberties pioneers watermarked with “Getty Images” to helicopter perspectives on the LA Riots to an influx of bodies moving to “The Dougie,” the carefully altered 7-minute video suspends watchers in a swelling, passionate montage that is a demonstration of Jafa’s significant capacity to mine, examine, and recover media’s illustrative modes and methodologies.
Close by fragments of well-known Black symbols and noteworthy occasions are likewise scenes including lesser-known figures: mysterious bodies in different conditions of rapture and gloom. Extracts from Jafa’s own staggering narrative film, Dreams are Colder than Death (2012) arches an individual measurement to symbolism for the most part drawn from news media, TV and the Internet.
In this pointed incorporation, Jafa unveils the two his helplessness and expert as a craftsman—contributing to the immense and complex territory of Black portrayal. While Love Is The Message piercingly typifies the craftsman’s longing to make a film that “repeats the power, magnificence and distance of Black Music,” it is additionally an update that the aggregate huge number characterizing Blackness is included solitary people, complex personalities and their untouchable contrasts.
Arthur Jafa The White Album
The White Album is Jafa’s fourth film investigating America’s history of race, power, and savagery, following Dreams Are Colder than Death and Apex (both 2013), just as Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death.
The last is a seven-minute overview of dark history, its incredible triumphs, and titanic misfortunes soundtracked to a hacked and-screwed version of Kanye West’s rap-gospel “Ultralight Beam.” It made Jafa, after about three many years of filmmaking, a star in the craftsmanship world.
That late-profession unmistakable quality was a genuine triumph for what Jafa has supported: the non-business investigation of darkness, in what he calls “Dark Cinema.” Other devotees incorporate Kahlil Joseph, Malik Sayeed, Bradford Young,Terence Nance, and Ja’Tovia Gary, among others—all craftsmen who have made motion pictures that, as per Jafa, “imitate the power, excellence, and distance of dark music.”
They are to a great extent exploratory and delighted movies, free of the Hollywood generalizations, adages, and conventional story structures found in the wayward, supposed New Black Film Renaissance that Jafa has rebuked throughout the years for its limited, standard intrigue. (A valid example: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, of which the craftsman was not a fan.)
In this vein, Jafa says The White Album “isn’t done and will change at regular intervals.” It’s a motion that catches that it is so hard to “put whiteness under the focal point,” and demonstrates that Jafa is less inspired by custom or the manner in which things have recently been done in movies (or historical centers). He is taken by the broad, pliable potential outcomes of the computerized video record that enables him to play perpetually with substance, however structure.
Arthur Jafa Music Videos
- Daughters of the Dust
- Love is the Message, The Message is Death
- The White Album
- Seven Songs for Malcolm X
- The Darker Side of Black
- Crooklyn
- A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde
- Rouch in Reverse
- W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices
- Bamako Sigi-Kan
- Conakry Kas
- Shadows of Liberty
- Roomieloverfriends
- Don’t Touch My Hair
- Cranes in the Sky
- The Start-Up
- Dreams Are Colder Than Death
- Florida Water
- In The Morning
- Killing Me Softly: The Roberta Flack Story
Arthur Jafa Book
- A Series of Utterly Improbable
- Yet Extraordinary Renditions
- Kerry James Marshall: A Creative Convening
Frequently Asked Questions About Arthur Jafa
Who is Arthur Jafa?
Jafa is an African American video artist, cinematographer, filmmaker and visual artist.
How old is Arthur?
He is 59 years old as of 2019.
How tall is Arthur?
Not known.
Is Arthur married?
Not known.
How much is Arthur worth?
Not known.
How much does Arthur make?
Not known.
Where does Arthur live?
Not known.
Is Arthur dead or alive?
He is alive and in good health.
Where is Arthur now?
He currently works as an artist, cinematographer and a film director and producer.