Projects: Garrett Bradley
MoMA, New York
Through March 21, 2021
GARRETT BRADLEY
America, 2019
Dir. Garrett Bradley
Courtesy the filmmaker
GARRETT BRADLEY
America, 2019
Dir. Garrett Bradley
Courtesy the filmmaker
The Museum of Modern Art presents Projects: Garrett Bradley, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, in the Museum’s street-level galleries. This exhibition, presented as part of a multiyear partnership between The Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, features a multichannel video installation, America (2019), a work organized around 12 short black-and-white films shot by Garrett Bradley and set to a score by Trevor Mathison and Udit Duseja. Among her original short vignettes, Garrett Bradley intersperses footage from Lime Kiln Club Field Day, an unreleased 1914 film believed to be the oldest surviving feature-length film with an all-Black cast. With America, Garrett Bradley imagines and pictures Black figures whose lives have been lost to history. Projects: Garrett Bradley is organized by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, the Studio Museum in Harlem, with Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, the Studio Museum in Harlem.
GARRETT BRADLEY
America, 2019
Dir. Garrett Bradley
Courtesy the filmmaker
The Library of Congress has estimated that 70 percent of the feature-length films made in the US between 1912 and 1929 have been lost. It is in these years that Garrett Bradley’s America finds its footing. Her evocative vignettes cite historical events, ranging from African American classical composer and baritone singer Harry T. Burleigh’s publication of the iconic spiritual “Deep River” in 1917, to the murder of popular jazz bandleader James Reese Europe in 1919, to the founding of baseball’s Negro National League (NNL) in 1920, and more. By including borrowed footage from Lime Kiln Club Field Day, Bradley also shines light on the history of a film radically progressive for its time. Lime Kiln Club Field Day evokes Black intimacy and a convivial sharing of space that celebrates Black vernacular movement and expression. This film had never been seen publicly until 2014, after it was rediscovered and restored by MoMA. By revisiting the recovery of this lost work and by giving lost stories visual life, Garrett Bradley considers how film impacts our ability to imagine history’s relationship to contemporary life. Garrett Bradley has said of her work, “I see America as a template for how visual storytelling and the assembly of images can serve as an archive of the past and a document of the present.”
Garrett Bradley’s Projects exhibition occurs in New York at a time when the status of early-20thcentury racial representations has become a matter of discussion and debate. As a multichannel installation, Garrett Bradley’s America constructs a physical space of invention in which turn-of-the-20th-century Black people and their ordinary lives are made present in ways that exceed the confines of what is available in an official archive.
GARRETT BRADLEY
America, 2019
Dir. Garrett Bradley
Courtesy the filmmaker
GARRETT BRADLEY BIOGRAPHY
Garrett Bradley (born 1986) is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in New York City. Working across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking, Garrett Bradley’s work addresses themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, Southern culture, and the history of film in the US. Her collaborative, research-based approach to filmmaking is often inspired by the real-life stories of her subjects. For Garrett Bradley, this research takes multiple forms—deep dives into historical archives, in-depth dialogues prompted by Craigslist want-ads, or an extended engagement with the communities and individuals she seeks to represent—and results in works that combine both scripted and improvisatory scenes. Garrett Bradley’s films explore the space between fact and fiction, embracing modes of working and of representing history that blur the boundaries between traditional notions of narrative and documentary cinema.
Garrett Bradley received her MFA from University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA from Smith College. Her short films and feature-length projects have been exhibited internationally at museums and festivals including the New Orleans Museum of Art; Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; Tribeca Film Festival, New York; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Rotterdam Film Festival, The Netherlands; and SXSW, Austin, Texas; among many others. In 2020 Garrett Bradley became the first African American woman to win the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and she has received numerous awards and honors, including a 2019–20 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the 2017 Sundance Jury Prize for her short film Alone, which was released by the New York Times OpDocs and became an Oscar contender for short nonfiction filmmaking, included in Academy Shortlist. Garrett Bradley was second unit director on Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, and in December 2019 she opened her first museum solo exhibition, Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, curated by Rebecca Matalon.
MoMA - MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
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