Focus on Garrett Bradley
Garrett Bradley, Alone, 2017
The work of artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley is rooted in the observation of American culture. With an incisive approach, Bradley’s work brings out the complexities and challenges of daily life, inviting the audience to reflect on the contemporary world both within her own country and its relationship to and within, the larger global narrative. Lo schermo dell’arte, which in 2019 presented her single channel film America, is pleased to dedicate the 2024 Focus to five additional works created between 2017 and 2022.
GARRETT BRADLEY
Garrett Bradley is an American artist, educator, and filmmaker. In 2020, Bradley presented her debut feature-length documentary, Time, which was nominated for more than fifty awards—including an Oscar—and won twenty, including the 2020 Peabody Award and the Best Director Award in the US Documentary Competition category at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, making her the first Black woman to win the award in the history of the festival. Bradley was a 2015 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is a recipient of the Prix de Rome (2019), the Arts and Letters Award for Art by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2022), and the Eye Filmmuseum’s Eye Art & Film Prize (2023). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2019); the Momentary, Crystal Bridges, Arkansas (2021); the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Pittsburgh (2022); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022). Bradley’s recent book Devotion, released in February 2024, was the first in a series of research-led publications on artists by MIT Press and Lisson Gallery.
Filmography
2022 Safe (Excerpt) 2021 Naomi Osaka 2020 Time 2019 Aka; America 2018 The Earth is Humming 2017 Alone 2014 Below Dreams
Programme
November 14, 2024 - 3:00 PM
NYU Florence, Villa Sassetti
The artist in conversation with Rossella Catanese, teacher at NYU Florence.
In English, free admission on reservation: lapietra.events@nyu.edu
November 14, 2024 - 9:00 PM
Cinema La Compagnia
USA, 2017, 13’
Italian Premiere
In the presence of the artist
In installations, shorts, and feature-length works, Bradley consistently locates her subjects in particular places frequently in her home city of New Orleans that become sites of a confrontation between personal narratives and larger historical and political ones. In her nonfiction work, Alone, a portrait of a single mother in New Orleans whose partner has been incarcerated in a facility that forbids in-person visits, Bradley disrupts the conventional hierarchies of observational documentary, positioning herself as confidant, advocate, and accomplice.
November 14, 2024 - following
Cinema La Compagnia
USA, 2019, 8’17’’
Italian premiere
In the presence of the artist
AKA, the first in a trilogy about women’s relationships, focuses on mothers and daughters in mixed-race families or those with varying skin tones. Garrett Bradley’s experimental short arose from conversations with her female protagonists, exploring race, upward mobility, and relationships between white and Black women. The term “color struck” shapes the film’s prismatic effects, contributing to its dream-like atmosphere. These dialogues influenced the film’s choreography and locations, reflecting the visions of its subjects.
November 14, 2024 - following
Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze
USA, 2022, sound, 3’15’’
Italian Premiere
In the presence of the artist
Safe (2022) is the second film in a trilogy exploring the overlap between women’s interior and exterior lives. Following AKA (2019), which examined intergenerational relationships, Safe delves into inner worlds, depicting them as vivid and parallel to the outside world. Featuring Donna Crump and Aloné Watts, the film captures the ineffable nature of interior emotions, treating them as a radical space of Black life. The excerpt was screened at a symposium organized by Hilton Als at The Brooklyn Museum.
November 14, 2024 - following
Cinema La Compagnia
First of three episodes of the Netflix docuseries
USA, 2021, 38’
The first of three episodes of the Netflix docuseries, Naomi Osaka: Rise offers an intimate look at the life of Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka, the highest-paid female athlete in the world, who won four Grand Slam titles by the age of 23. Far from the rhetoric of traditional sports films, Bradley presents Osaka both in moments of success and in more opaque and complex times, highlighting her honesty and her reflections on profound themes such as identity and gender politics.
November 15, 2024 - 5:00 PM
Cinema La Compagnia
USA, 2020, 81’
Italian premiere
In this intimate yet epic love story filmed over two decades, indomitable matriarch Fox Rich strives to raise her six sons and keep her family together as she fights for her husband’s release from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola. Time which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was Bradley’s first documentary feature and what the artist calls a “sister film,” to her 2017 short, Alone.