Watch now! A powerful examination of Black life in America

SAAM presents a special 48-hour streaming event featuring Arthur Jafa's Love is the Message, The Message is Death.

Online for the First Time

Watch Love is the Message, The Message is Death Online from 2 p.m Friday until 2 p.m. Sunday

Artist Arthur Jafa’s powerful 7:25 minute video Love is the Message, The Message is Death offers a moving montage of original and appropriated footage, set to Kanye West’s gospel-inflected song “Ultralight Beam,” that explores the mix of joy and pain, transcendence and tragedy that characterize the Black American experience. Extolled by the New Yorker  as “required viewing,” the video points to the ongoing violence and racism against Black people that is foundational to U.S. history and continues to play out in the present.

Watch Now

Join us online for this special 48-hour streaming event and learn more about the artwork.

Arthur Jafa, Love is the Message, The Message is Death, 2016, single-channel digital video, high definition, color, sound; 07:25 minutes, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Joint museum purchase with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Nion T. McEvoy, Chair of SAAM Commission (2016-2018), and McEvoy's fellow Commissioners in his honor; additional funding provided by Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest Fund, 2020.001., 2020.3, ©2016, Arthur Jafa. Image courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York / Rome.

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