GEOFF BENNETT: As cultural institutions across the country face growing pressure to avoid issues of race, a major new exhibition is confronting them head on.

The work of artist Arthur Jafa spans two floors of New York's New Museum and his largest exhibition to date.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown met with Jafa for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

JEFFREY BROWN: Everywhere you look in Arthur Jafa new exhibition, one image is placed next to another, whether still or moving, each affecting the other, each changed by its proximity to the other.

ARTHUR JAFA, Artist and Filmmaker: This is the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe.

That image has never existed next to that image.

One picture here, another picture there, you put them next to each other, boom, we got something else.

JEFFREY BROWN: At New York's New Museum, the boom of Jafa's exhibition, titled I Am Tony, a reference to jazz drummer Tony Williams, extends over two floors.

Photographs and sculptures, wall plaques, and installations of cutout figures, music and soundscapes everywhere.

(MUSIC) JEFFREY BROWN: Most of all, his films, including "Love Is the Message, The Message is Death" from 2016, a seven-minute montage or visual poem made from more than 100 video and archival clips, portraying the pain and joy, the hatred and celebration of Black life in America.

ARTHUR JAFA: I'm less interested increasingly in making work about Black people and more interested in making work like Black people.

JEFFREY BROWN: What does that mean?

ARTHUR JAFA: It means I'm not trying to declare anything about Black people.

I'm just trying to make things that in some way parallel or reflect the complexity of Black being or what a Black person, how a Black person might be understood.

JEFFREY BROWN: Jafa was born and raised in Mississippi.

He started out in the film world, notably a cinematographer on "Daughters of the Dust," the 1991 movie directed by his former wife, Julie Dash.

He would work with Spike Lee and Stanley Kubrick.

His turn to the art world came later.

He's always been a collector and creator of images.

Here, he's constructed a kind of maze of them that visitors can walk through.

ARTHUR JAFA: It's a different way to structure them, like you're moving through the relationship of images, as opposed to standing outside of them.

JEFFREY BROWN: Another display here, a series of photographic notebooks.

ARTHUR JAFA: Yes, I have just been fascinated with that.

All of my life, just I have been gatherer, a hoarder, maybe even of images and stuff.

I consume images, so I'm also interested in cooking, just to take the analogy.

JEFFREY BROWN: Cooking them?

ARTHUR JAFA: Yes, I mean, you know what I'm saying?

You -- if there's something you're interested in, you don't necessarily just want to consume it.

You want to produce it as well.

JEFFREY BROWN: His art films can be quick-cut still images, as in "SloPEX," playing in the room where we talked, or extended scenes, as in "The White Album," another meditation on race and racial attitudes.

"Akingdoncomethas" is an hour-45-minute portrait of the Black church with sermons and singing, while "Aghdra" is a computer-generated ocean, lava-like, accompanied by a soundtrack of slowed-down soul music.

ARTHUR JAFA: A lot of it is just leaning into an aspect of moving images that I think is musical.

JEFFREY BROWN: Music, culture, history, the full variety of lived Black experience and all its complexities, as in one of Jafa's newest works, "M.J.," for Michael Jackson, the mesmerizing performer, the troubled individual.

There's the moment in "Love Is the Message, The Message is Death" where a woman says, what would America be if it loved Black people as much as it loves Black culture?

So you are looking at the both the beauty and the violence.

ARTHUR JAFA: Yes.

Sometimes, I say we like the canary in the mine shaft, a Western civilization, but the mine shaft is an incredible place to be.

Black culture exists in a perpetual state of emergency.

And I mean that in both senses of it, like crisis and the pressure of crisis, but also constantly emerging, constantly coming up with new things.

And that coming up with new things, this sort of inventiveness, the improvisation, all that, it is -- and it's strictly bound up with the pressure of Black life.

You can't separate the two.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you're capturing that in these films.

ARTHUR JAFA: I'm capturing it.

I'm trying to -- like I said, I'm trying to make a thing that's like it, that is modeled on in some kind of way, so is a rich enough proxy of the actual thing, you know?

JEFFREY BROWN: You have said many times you don't think of yourself as a protest artist or... ARTHUR JAFA: I'm definitely not.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

So it's not a political artist.

This isn't -- it's not... ARTHUR JAFA: It's not, not political either.

If you make a rendering of a Black anything, Black child, Black grandmother, it's going to be inherently political just because this is an anti-Black environment, but it doesn't mean that's necessarily what your motivations are.

It's like we exist, we continue to exist, we have a very complex relationship with our continued existence, and we recognize that other people have a complex relationship with our continued existence.

So they say you make art about what you know, and this is what we know, so I'm trying to make art about what I know.

JEFFREY BROWN: Arthur Jafa's exhibition I Am Tony continues through January 3.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at the New Museum in New York.