Stephen Best joins MATRIX artist Arthur Jafa in conversation to discuss the artist’s transition from the cinema screen to the gallery, the politics of Jafa’s aesthetics, and the turn toward “Afropessimism” in black thought. 

Jafa is an artist, director, editor, and award-winning cinematographer whose poignant work expands the concept of black cinema while exploring African American experience and race relations in everyday life. He has stated, “I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music.”

Best is an associate professor of English and film and media at UC Berkeley whose fields of expertise encompass American and African American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory.