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Garrett Bradley featured in a Collection's Presentation at Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, United States

12 September 2025

From 12 September 2025 – 1 February 2026, Smith College Museum of Art presents their collection featuring Garret Bradley's film A.K.A. A.K.A. is the first in a trilogy of films about relationships between women, in this case relationships between mothers and daughters born into mixed-race families or families of the same race with varying skin tones.

Like many of Garrett Bradley’s films, the experimental short developed out of hours-long conversations between Bradley and her female protagonists. She began with a series of questions regarding race, upward mobility, and the relationship between white women and black women, which the artist posed to friends, family, and on social media—an ongoing resource in her work. In one instance, one of Bradley’s subjects repeatedly asked her mother, “Are you color struck?” The term, made famous by Zora Neal Hurston’s 1925 play of the same name, refers to the notion of “colorism,” which describes both interracial and intraracial forms of discrimination based on the color of one’s skin.

Bradley subsequently used the phrase to shape the visual and sonic landscape of the film—specifically A.K.A.’s prismatic and shimmering effects, which contribute to the film’s hallucinatory and dream-like atmosphere. Her dialogues with mothers and daughters would also determine much of the choreography and locations of scenes, articulating an approach to filmmaking that both honors and issues from the visions and voices of its subjects.

Find out more via Smith College Museum of Art.

Image: Garrett Bradley, Still from AKA, 2019, Single channel video, HD (color, sound), 8 minutes 17 seconds

Garrett Bradley featured in a Collection's Presentation at Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, United States
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