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Did you watch Arthur Jafa's Love is the Message, The Message is Death? Send us your thoughts and questions.

Did you watch Love is the Message, The Message is Death?

How did this artwork make you feel? What thoughts or questions did it raise?

Your submissions will guide an online conversation on Thursday, July 9, at 3 p.m. with curators from SAAM and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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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.

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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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