Midcity, Los Angeles
Arthur Jafa
The White Album
Hammer MuseumArthur Jafa's 30-minute experimental film The White Album (2018) examines how visual media can transmit the "power, beauty, and alienation" of Black music in American culture. Following his critically acclaimed film Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016), The White Album is a social critique of whiteness. Assembled from found and produced footage, the film collages digital media into a radical visual and literary mixtape that articulates the ways in which the vitality and survival of Black American people—their labor, ideas, and cultural output—are historically co-opted by white culture through coercion and violence. Arthur Jafa: The White Album is organized by Erin Christovale, curator, with Azul Silverio, curatorial assistant.