In a ground-floor gallery at the Museum of Modern Art, the artist Arthur Jafa was examining a flimsy inkjet copy of Piet Mondrian’s 1943 icon of abstract art,“Broadway Boogie Woogie,” which hung loose on the wall from gobs of blue putty. Also present as a mere printout: a postwar quilt by Lutisha Pettway, of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Nearby, plinths sat waiting for sculptures by Bruce Nauman, Ellsworth Kelly and Lygia Clark.

With a week left before the Nov. 19 opening of “Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa,” it seemed that none of this unfinishedness left Jafa, the exhibition’s creator, notably anxious as he let his mind’s eye encompass the total effect, even without some of the actual artworks.

Maybe that’s because Jafa, offered the chance to build a show from MoMA’s vast holdings, came up with something that is less a curatorial exercise than the latest product of his M.O. as an artist. Taking in his exhibition, he likened his art to the craft of a D.J., in which you start with creations by other people, and then “put one thing that has some affective power next to another thing that has some affective power, and see what they do — they make a new kind of vision.”

At MoMA, his collisions of Mondrian with Pettway, of Nauman with Clark — of a Warhol “Race Riot” with a Rothko abstraction — have a parallel in what Jafa did, nine years ago, with the video “mix” that brought him his first dose of art-world fame. For “Love Is the Message, The Message is Death,” Jafa accumulated clips of Black life, from religious ecstasy to police brutality to musical genius, into a single vision of race in America, heart-rending and also heartwarming. Many critics — including this writer — have judged it one of the great works of our young century.

The MoMA show certifies Jafa’s talent: He’s the 17th creator in the “Artist’s Choice” series. Founded in 1989, it asks artists to scour MoMA’s collection for works to display in new ways. Jafa joins such eminent predecessors as Ellsworth Kelly, Elizabeth Murray and Chuck Close — even the composer Stephen Sondheim. But Jafa, still an art-world tyro, has an advantage over those veterans: They had to switch roles from creator to curator, whereas for Jafa, those have often been the same thing. He creates by curating, assembling imagery that already exists into new works that speak for themselves. For Jafa, the artworks on view here are “just things — they’re things to move around,” he said. They’re as much his art supplies, that is, as the precious creations of illustrious forerunners.

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