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America

by Garrett Bradley
USA 2019, 30′
Presented at Lo schermo dell’arte 2019 and 2024 (13th and 19th edition)
PHOTOGRAPHY: Akasha Rabut, BLVXMTH
EDITING: Garrett Bradley
PRODUCER: Lauren Domino, Catherine Gund
In collaboration with Black History Month Florence and American Academy in Rome
Taking as its starting point the recently rediscovered Bert Williams feature Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913)—the first known film to feature an all-Black cast—Garrett Bradley’s extraordinary new short imagines an entire lost lineage of African-American cinema, where images of Black joy, strength, and beauty live on forever in a free-floating celluloid dream space. Shot in gorgeously poetic black and white and set to an intricately layered audio collage, America is an ecstatic sensory experience that rewrites our visual history in the name of Black empowerment.
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.
Selected Filmography
2022 Safe (Excerpt); 2021 Naomi Osaka; 2020 Time; 2019 Aka; America; 2018 The Earth is Humming; 2017 Alone; 2014 Below Dreams