POTOMAC, MD.- Glenstone Museum opened an installation by Arthur Jafa consisting of recent video, sculpture, and photography. The multidisciplinary ensemble, selected by the artist and presented in Room 6 of the Pavilions, is the first solo museum exhibition of Jafa’s work in the Washington, D.C. area.

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, MS) is an artist and filmmaker who collects and collages a range of content and textures—including video clips from YouTube, sci-fi movies, archival still images, digital animations, snippets of sporting events, and police dashcam footage, among others—to create a cinema that, in his own words, “replicates the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music.” Jafa is creating a new installation of his work at Glenstone, drawn primarily from the museum’s collection and shown together for the first time.

“In 2020, we joined nearly a dozen other museums in a landmark coordinated streaming of Love is the Message, The Message is Death,” said Emily Wei Rales, director and co-founder of Glenstone. “We are honored to be collaborating again with Arthur Jafa to present a range of his two-dimensional and sculptural work alongside his film. The result is a multisensorial experience that continues his examination of the many dimensions of the Black experience.”

The centerpiece of the Glenstone installation is akingdoncomethas, 2018, which culls nearly two hours of footage of Black fellowship intercut with images of wildfires, celebrating the restorative power of faith in times of crisis. The length of the video roughly corresponds to the duration of a church service while highlighting the emotion and creativity of preaching and gospel music. Presented for the first time on a monumental scale, the work will be projected onto a dedicated wall within the 4,500-square-foot space.

“At Glenstone, we embrace artists who challenge us to think anew about how architecture enables aspects of their work to be reconsidered,” continued Rales. “Arthur Jafa is rethinking akingdoncomethas in terms of its spatial presence, sonic power, and visual impact. He is using the entirety of the exhibition space as a vehicle to meld several discrete artworks into one.”

Included in the exhibition is Big Wheel VI, 2018, a sculpture of a seven-foot-tall wheel enmeshed in chains. Inspired by the monster truck culture in the South, the work hints at both the restraints used on human beings and the decline of the U.S. automobile industry that disproportionately impacted Black communities.

Nearby hangs the wall relief, Ex-Slave Gordon, 2017, based on an 1863 photograph of the severely scarred back of a man who escaped slavery and later fought in the Union Army that helped to inflame the Abolitionist movement. Jafa renders the image in three dimensions, bringing the picture into the present-day viewer’s space by casting the form in plastic.

Jafa’s work has been exhibited widely. Recent solo exhibitions include the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2020); Fundação de Serralves, Portugal (2020); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017), among many others. His video artwork The White Album, 2018, was included in the 58th Venice Biennale where Jafa received the Golden Lion Award, the top prize for best work on view.