New Museum Opens Its Fall Season With Arthur Jafa's Largest Survey

NEW YORK — The New Museum will open its fall exhibitions on September 24 with the largest survey to date of artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. “I Am Tony” occupies two floors of the expanded Bowery building and brings together nearly four decades of moving-image work, photography, sculpture and painting. The season also includes Diego Marcon's first New York museum solo exhibition, a history of the Bowery and a commission by Ho Tzu Nyen.

Jafa's exhibition is described as the first United States museum survey to encompass the full breadth of his practice. It includes celebrated works such as “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death” and “The White Album,” along with recent projects and new work. The title honors jazz drummer Tony Williams, pointing to the musical structures that shape Jafa's editing, rhythm and approach to images.

The New Museum reopens its galleries on September 24 with four fall presentations. Photo: Beyond My Ken / CC BY-SA 4.0. Display size adjusted.

The scale matters because Jafa is often discussed through a few influential films, even though his work crosses media and decades. Presenting the pieces together allows visitors to follow recurring questions about Black life, violence, beauty, popular culture and the circulation of images. It also tests how the intensity of short moving-image works changes when placed inside a career-long museum account.

Diego Marcon's “Arrivederci, Piggies!” provides a sharply different companion. The Italian artist's first New York museum exhibition extends his use of film, sound and unsettling narrative. The pairing gives the fall season more than one emotional register and avoids treating the building as a single-artist monument, even with Jafa holding the largest footprint.

“The Bowery: Devil's Mile” turns attention to the museum's neighborhood through a 400-year cultural history. That choice is important for an institution whose expansion has changed its physical relationship to the street. A museum can celebrate architecture and global artists while still asking what histories, communities and pressures exist outside its doors.

Ho Tzu Nyen's site-specific work for the glass-front elevators brings art into circulation space rather than a conventional gallery. Visitors encounter it while moving through the building, making transit part of the exhibition experience. Together, the four presentations use floors, elevators and neighborhood history to activate the expanded museum as more than a container for objects.

The public program is unusually broad. The museum has scheduled artist conversations, symposia, screenings, book launches and activities connected to the exhibitions. It will also offer Saturday art-making sessions in the seventh-floor Sky Room, a monthly Bowery Art Space for New York City teenagers and a family day with free admission for participating families.

Opening day includes member preview hours, regular public hours and a pay-what-you-wish evening. Access programs cannot erase the cost of visiting New York cultural institutions, but predictable free or reduced-price windows help audiences plan. The museum's challenge is to make those programs easy to find and welcoming to visitors who do not already consider themselves part of the contemporary-art world.

For Arttainment, the season illustrates a useful balance between major art and public experience. Jafa's survey carries international importance, yet the Bowery history and community programs keep the story connected to place. Museums build authority through scholarship, but they build relationships through repeat visits, education and spaces where people can make or discuss work themselves.

The New Museum's fall opening is therefore more than a list of exhibitions. It is a test of what the expanded building can support: a large career survey, emerging international work, neighborhood history and sustained public activity at the same time. If the season succeeds, visitors will leave with a clearer sense of Jafa's achievement and of the institution's responsibilities on the Bowery.

Visitors planning a trip should confirm hours and program registration on the museum's calendar, since talks and workshops may have separate capacity limits. The exhibitions reward more than a quick opening-week visit. Jafa's films demand time, while the Bowery material and elevator commission ask audiences to notice the building itself. Returning later in the season may reveal how public programs change the meaning of the galleries around them.

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