Following this summer’s online screening, the DMA is pleased to offer visitors another opportunity to see Arthur Jafa’s renowned film Love is the Message, The Message is Death. In this collage of found and self-produced footage set to the soundtrack of Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” Jafa juxtaposes representations of Black artists, scholars, athletes, and politicians—as well as everyday people largely unknown to the general audience—with depictions of events ranging from faith-based transcendence to police brutality. The resulting video is a kaleidoscope of past, present, and future that expresses both the cyclical nature of historical injustice and the alternative realities envisioned by a wide range of Black cultural traditions.
Find more resources from the online presentation at virtual.DMA.org/love-is-the-message.
Focus Installation
Admission is FREE.
The Dallas Museum of Art is supported, in part, by the generosity of DMA Members and donors, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture.
Images: Arthur Jafa, Love is the Message, The Message is Death, 2016, video, color and black-and-white, sound, running time: 7 minutes, 30 seconds, Dallas Museum of Art, Gift of Marguerite Steed Hoffman and Thomas W. Lentz, 2017.31. Courtesy of Arthur Jafa and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/ Rome