FEBRUARY 17 - JUNE 6, 2021 The New Museum
Group Exhibition
The New Museum will present “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” an exhibition originally conceived by Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019) for the New Museum, and presented with curatorial support from advisors Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash. “Grief and Grievance” will be an intergenerational exhibition, bringing together thirty-seven artists working in a variety of mediums who have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of racist violence experienced by Black communities across America. The exhibition will further consider the intertwined phenomena of Black grief and a politically orchestrated white grievance, as each structures and defines contemporary American social and political life. “Grief and Grievance” will comprise works encompassing video, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, sound, and performance made in the last decade, along with several key historical works and a series of new commissions created in response to the concept of the exhibition.
NOVEMBER 21 2020 - MARCH 21 2021 The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA
Solo Museum Exhibition
The Museum of Modern Art will present Projects: Garrett Bradley, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, in the Museum’s street-level galleries from October 2020, through January 3, 2021. This exhibition, presented as part of a multiyear partnership between The Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, will feature a multichannel video installation, America (2019), a work organized around 12 short black-and-white films shot by Bradley and set to a score by Trevor Mathison and Udit Duseja. Among her original short vignettes, 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, 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.
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 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, Bradley considers how film impacts our ability to imagine history’s relationship to contemporary life. 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.” The Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series is made possible in part by the Elaine Dannheisser Foundation and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.
OCTOBER 14 - MARCH 14 2021 McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
New Labor Movements is a collection of short films that explore contemporary visions of America and concepts of transnational Blackness. Through a compositional discourse that extends across four hour-long “movements,” the program navigates the philosophical, psychological, and emotional landscapes that manifest in the lives of slavery’s descendants and those living in the aftermath of slavery’s indirect, proximal effects.
Curator Leila Weefur organizes the program to consider the question of “What is America today?” as inspired by Lessons of the Hour, Isaac Julien’s immersive film and photographic exhibition on the life and legacy of Frederick Douglass. Evidenced in the selection of films are thoughtful articulations of movement that reveal the nuance of global political critique and a profound broadness of Black life across borders. The act of movement is a structurally fluid principle that shapes the program and its explorations of film construction and narrative; the distribution of labor and power; the trans-Atlantic movements of goods, capital, and people; and one’s movement through a gallery or in a theater. Taken together with the multi-sensorial, meditative qualities of Lessons, the program engineers a gender diverse, intergenerational dialogue amongst Black filmmakers that explores the creation of cinematic narrative and Black political history.
Just as we are living through an unpredictable emotional landscape, the included films gracefully shift pace, matching the current political unrest with a poetic volatility. Movement I: Assembly presents five films that orient the viewer to linkages between the creation of Diasporic history and collective experience. The program is poignantly introduced by the 16mm black-and-white shots of an African American gospel choir in Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena Harold’s elegiac Hampton (2019). Across three films, Movement II: Resistance/Selfhood identifies realizations of the self within societal narratives of struggle and triumph, acutely seen in Lonnie Holley and Cyrus Moussavi’s metaphor for Black transcendence, I Snuck Off the Slave Ship (2019). Woven throughout the two movements are the visions of Black ancestors, elders, and children, coalescing into a visual guide to reconsider movements as acts of power, liberation, and achievement.
Movement I: Assembly and Movement II: Resistance/Selfhood screen daily at McEvoy Arts in 2020. Movements III and IV premiere in 2021.
JANUARY 25, 2020 Sundance Film Festival (Salt Lake City, UT)
World Premiere, Nonfiction Feature - TIME
(Winner, Best Director)
JANUARY 9, 2020 MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY)
Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
On the occasion of the paperback release of cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, MoMA PS1 invites artists Garrett Bradley, Arthur Jafa, Simone Leigh, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Cameron Rowland for a public celebration with the author. These artists will respond to her genre-defying book, presenting their own beautiful experiments inspired by Hartman’s writing and their intimate relationships to her work.
6:30 - 8:30PMEST
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Queens, NY 1101
INFO
DECEMBER 19, 2019 - MARCH 22, 2020 CAMH HOUSTON (Houston, TX)
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is pleased to present Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody, the first solo museum presentation of the work of New Orleans-based artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley (b. 1986, New York, New York). On view in CAMH’s Brown Foundation Gallery from December 19, 2019–March 22, 2020, the exhibition will feature a selection of new and recent single and multi-channel films and videos by the artist.
Related Events
Opening Reception | Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody, Wednesday, December 18, 2019 | 6:30–9PM
In Conversation | Garrett Bradley and Rebecca Matalon, Thursday, December 19, 2019 | 6:30–7:30PM
Talk | Huey Copeland and Rebecca Matalon in Conversation, Thursday, February 6, 2019 | 6:30–7:30PM
NOVEMBER 16, 2019
LO SHERMO DELL’ARTE, 12TH EDITION
9:00PM Cinema La Compagnia, Florence
America by Garrett Bradley, USA, 2019, sound, 30’
Italian premiere in the presence of the artist
In thirty minutes of black and white images, the director intertwines scenes from Bert Williams’s new silent film Lime Kiln Club Field Day with twelve of her short films inspired by African American historical figures who’ve become “invisible”. The soundtrack was composed by Trevor Mathison, one of the founding members of the Black Audio Film Collective.
NOVEMBER 24, 2019
MAXXI MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLA ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO
VideoArt x Videocittà 2
OCTOBER 19, 2019
THE BROAD @ ARRAY (Los Angeles, CA)
Shirin Neshat + Garrett Bradley
The Broad and filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s nonprofit film collective ARRAY, brings together Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat and New Orleans-based filmmaker Garrett Bradley (whose films are featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial) at the new ARRAY campus in Historic Filipinotown. The event will begin with screenings of excerpts from Neshat’s new work, Land of Dreams, and Bradley’s short film, America, followed by a conversation with the artists on the themes of movements and migration across time and land, which are explored in their work.
OCTOBER 11 - 17, 2019
BAM ROSE CINEMAS (Brooklyn, NY)
Garrett Bradley’s America: A Journey Through Race and Time
With her revelatory new short film America, Garrett Bradley does nothing less than construct a joyous alternative history of African-American representation on screen. For this week-long special presentation, we present Bradley’s stunning vision in seven different programs, each offering a unique prism through which to consider the history—and future—of the construction of Blackness in American cinema. We’re delighted to also present a retrospective of pre-America work by Bradley, one of the most intriguing and versatile filmmakers active today. Special thanks to Field of Vision.
Program
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11
7:30PM: America + Lime Kiln Club Field Day
Live musical accompaniment by Jimmy Cobb and Darrian Douglas
Post-screening panel discussion with Garrett Bradley and Saidiya Hartman
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12
7:00PM: America + Four Women + Illusions
Post-screening panel discussion with Garrett Bradley and Julie Dash
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13
2:00PM: America + Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Post-screening panel discussion with Garrett Bradley and RaMell Ross
MONDAY, OCTOBER 14
7:00PM: America + Stormy Weather
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15
2:00PM: America + The Race Film
+ Intro by Ina Archer (Media Conservation & Digitization Assistant, Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History & Culture)
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16
7:00PM: BAM & Black Portraiture[s]: Responding to Garrett Bradley’s America
Post-screening panel discussion with Racquel Gates, Michael B. Gillespie & Nicole R. Fleetwood
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17
7:00PM: Garrett Bradley Shorts Program
8:45PM: Below Dreams (feature)
Post-screening Q+A with Garrett Bradley
INFO
OCTOBER 10, 2019
LEWIS CENTER FOR THE ARTS’ PROGRAM IN VISUAL ARTS (Princeton University)
Radical Nonfiction Film Series: Fantasy, Observation and Elasticity in Documentary.
On Thursday, October 10, the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts at Princeton University continues the fall film series, Radical Nonfiction: Fantasy, Observation and Elasticity in the Documentary Film, with a screening of America and new short films by Garrett Bradley. The screening begins at 7:00 p.m. in the James Stewart Film Theater and will be followed by a conversation with Bradley and series organizer and filmmaker Robert Greene. The event is free and open to the public.
The series has been put together by Greene to take the current pulse of the ever-changing documentary film form. He notes, “Documentary film is full of contradictions; the staged meets the observed, intervention meets the authentic. Documentary film uses observation to show us the world we inhabit, but nonfiction images are also records of the fantasies of both filmmakers and subjects. What we believe, how we subjectively formulate our experiences — the fantasy of our own realities — can be captured and magnified by the camera and how we edit images together. This is documentary: an elastic, ever-changing attempt at working with the world as it is and as we hope it be.”
INFO
JUNE 28 - OCTOBER 13, 2019
NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART (Louisiana)
Bodies of Knowledge brings together ten international contemporary artists to reflect on the role that language plays in archiving and asserting our cultural identities. Working with materials that range from books and silent film to ink, ashes and musical scores, artists Manon Bellet, Wafaa Bilal, Garrett Bradley, Adriana Corral, Mahmoud Chouki, Zhang Huan, William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Edward Spots and Wilmer Wilson IV propose language as a living and ever-evolving document that can counter more staid and static ways of representing our collective pasts. Organized around a series of immersive installation and film projects, Bodies of Knowledge asks us to consider how we might write more inclusive narratives, reshape public space, and account for bodies and histories that have, in large measure, been written out of them. Bringing a new global perspective to current conversations in New Orleans surrounding cultural preservation and historical memory, Bodies of Knowledge draws together artists working with many different systems of knowledge to illustrate how history can be erased, rewritten and asserted anew.
Bodies of Knowledge is curated by Katie Kpfohl and organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art and sponsored by Pia and Malcolm Ehrhardt, Drs. Joy and Howard Osofsky, Margo and Clancy DuBos, Carol and Byron Crawford, Kenya and Quentin Messer, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
MAY 17 - SEPTEMBER 22, 2019
WHITNEY BIENNIAL (New York, NY)
Often described as a snapshot of art in the United States, the Biennial brings together work by individuals and collectives in a broad array of mediums. Over the past year and a half—an undeniably intense and polarized time in this country—we made hundreds of studio visits. While we often encountered heightened emotions, they were directed toward thoughtful and productive experimentation, the re-envisioning of self and society, and political and aesthetic strategies for survival. Although much of the work presented here is steeped in sociopolitical concerns, the cumulative effect is open-ended and hopeful.
Key issues and approaches emerge across the exhibition: the mining of history as a means to reimagine the present or future; a profound consideration of race, gender, and equity; and explorations of the vulnerability of the body. Concerns for community appear in the content and social engagement of the work and also in the ways that the artists navigate the world. Many of the artists included emphasize the physicality of their materials, whether in sculptures assembled out of found objects, heavily worked paintings, or painstakingly detailed drawings. An emphasis on the artist’s hand suggests a rejection of the digital and the related slick, packaged presentation of the self in favor of more individualized and idiosyncratic work.
While we were organizing this exhibition, broader debates in the public sphere surfaced at the Museum, which itself became the site and subject of protest, as it has been throughout its history. Fundamental to the Whitney’s identity is its openness to dialogue, and the conversations that have occurred here and across the country became a productive lens through which to synthesize our own looking, thinking, and self-questioning.
The 2019 Whitney Biennial is organized by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, with Ramsay Kolber. The film program is organized by Maori Karmael Holmes, Sky Hopinka, and Matt Wolf.
The performance program is organized by Jane Panetta, Rujeko Hockley, and Greta Hartenstein.