PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Barnes Foundation presents Freedom Dreams, an exhibition of powerful works in film, video, and installation by an intergenerational cohort of Black artists interested in exploring history, archives, and cultural memory. The exhibition features works by Arthur Jafa, David Hartt, Garrett Bradley, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Tourmaline that dismantle pervasive narratives around race, gender, and class in American history. Co-curated by James Claiborne, Fleischner Family Vice President for Engagement at the Barnes, and Maori Karmael Holmes, Chief Executive and Artistic Officer of BlackStar Projects, Freedom Dreams marks the first occasion these works will be presented at a museum in Philadelphia.

Exploring Black American history and identity, Freedom Dreams offers an opportunity to interrogate the complex histories of the United States in relationship to the identities and legacies the featured artists bring to light through their work. Resilience, resistance, and Black joy are present within the exhibition across all works in varying measures. Philadelphia, the birthplace of the nation, is not only central to the United States’s upcoming 250th anniversary in July but also the ideal location for this exhibition, dedicated to exploring the freedom and potential in liberatory imagination.

“We are proud to present Freedom Dreams, an exhibition featuring the work of five renowned filmmakers whose work explores Black American history and identity,” says Thom Collins, Neubauer Family Executive Director and President of the Barnes. “Our founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, was a visionary collector and pioneering educator committed to racial equality and social justice. He believed that education was the cornerstone of a truly democratic society and established a scholarship program to support young Black artists, musicians, and writers who sought to further their education at the Barnes and elsewhere. This poignant and timely exhibition brings this important part of our history to the forefront, and, along with our other exhibitions and installations planned for 2026, will offer a powerful exploration of the American experience.”

Freedom Dreams is titled in homage to author and historian Robin D. G. Kelley’s writings on the radical imagination and visionary ideas of Black thinkers, artists, and activists that examine how their dreams of freedom shaped movements for social change. The exhibition will offer space for reflection and contemplation and encourage audiences to examine the present day through the lens of Black radical imagination. Equal parts celebration and interrogation, Freedom Dreams will explore ways in which contemporary Black artists from different areas of the United States—Los Angeles, the South, and the Northeast—engage with history and cultural memory. It will highlight the fluid boundary between past, present, and future, encouraging viewers to reflect on how Black Americans have shaped identities and created spaces of resistance, joy, and resilience in the face of systemic oppression.

“One of our goals with Freedom Dreams is to reveal connections among different generations of Black artists in America across varying disciplines who have found commonality in moving image assemblage and in creating an archive where none previously existed,” say Claiborne and Holmes. “Through the exhibition, we will draw out points of connection between the artists’ histories and their work, and invite audiences to reflect on a larger question: what does liberation and freedom look like for Black Americans 250 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence?”

The exhibition features five major film, video, and installation works:

• Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) by Arthur Jafa traces African American identity through a vast spectrum of found footage and contemporary imagery. Including photographs of Civil Rights–era leaders in the American South, helicopter footage taken during the Los Angeles uprisings in response to the Rodney King verdict in the 1990s, and YouTube social dance tutorials, the video compels viewers to examine the historical representation of Black bodies throughout American history. Runtime: 7:25 min.

• On Exactitude in Science (Watts) (2021) by David Hartt reflects on the architectural and social fabric of the Watts neighborhood in South Los Angeles, drawing inspiration from Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) to examine the enduring impact of historical events on urban communities. Evoking the necessity and futility of mapping expressed in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges with which it shares a title, the film depicts homes and streets devoid of inhabitants, inviting contemplation on lives within the community and beyond. Runtime: 15:47 min.

• America (2019) by Garrett Bradley reimagines early 20th-century Black life through an immersive, multi-screen film installation. The work brings together 12 black-and-white scenes with rare footage from Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1913), often considered the earliest surviving film made with an all-Black cast and integrated crew. Moving through the years 1915 to 1926, Bradley layers images across translucent screens arranged in a broken X, encouraging viewers to move through the space as the images overlap. A richly textured soundscape blends historical and contemporary sounds, inviting audiences to experience history not as distant or fixed, but as lived, felt, and deeply present. Runtime: 23:55 min.

• Quiet as It’s Kept (2023) by Ja’Tovia Gary is an experimental documentary developed as a contemporary response to Toni Morrison’s seminal novel The Bluest Eye, which unpacks the legacy and lived experiences of colorism. The film combines 16mm footage, social media clips, as well as archival and original interview footage to reckon with internalized and structural anti-Blackness in US culture. Runtime: 26:14 min.

• Pollinator (2022) by Tourmaline, which was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, invites viewers into a meditative exploration of Black transgender freedom, memory, and the natural world. Centered on a reimagining of transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson’s funeral and underpinned by almost two decades of research into the pioneering figure, the film weaves footage of Tourmaline herself, as a generator and receiver of creative forces, together with archival imagery of Johnson’s memorial procession. Runtime: 5:08 min.

THE ARTISTS

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist and filmmaker. Jafa grew up between Tupelo, Mississippi, and the Mississippi Delta and witnessed the tensions associated with both desegregation and continued segregation. With a career spanning over three decades, Jafa uses multidisciplinary work to reference, discuss, and question the meaning and potentialities of Black experiences.

David Hartt (b. 1967, Montreal) currently lives and works in Philadelphia where he is an associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. Hartt’s interdisciplinary work unpacks the social, cultural, and economic complexities of his various subjects. He employs extensive research in his work to examine the multitude of ways historic ideas and ideals persist or transform over time. His work has included an array of media—including video, sculpture, sound, photographs, and found materials—to investigate time, place, and sociocultural moments and attitudes.

Garrett Bradley is an American artist and filmmaker. Her moving-image practice examines history, place, and the racial and economic politics of everyday life. Grounded in archival research and intimate dialogue, Bradley situates her subjects distinctly in place, rooting sociopolitical themes in the minutiae of lived experience. Her immersive films blur fact and fiction to expand conventional modes of representing Black, and thus American, history. Bradley’s work has screened internationally, earning over 50 nominations and 20 awards, including an Academy Award nomination; Best Director at Sundance in 2020, making her the first Black woman to receive the honor and a 2025 MacArthur Fellowship.

Ja’Tovia Gary (b. 1984, Dallas) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist utilizing documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. Her work focuses on a Black feminist subjectivity and draws from public media and private archives to disrupt notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling. Gary aims to unmask power and its influence on how individuals perceive and create reality.

Tourmaline (b. 1983, Roxbury, Massachusetts) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work calls to attention the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and underscores their ability to impact the world. Tourmaline uses visual and narrative means to reassess and rewrite cultural histories in an attempt to imagine and formulate a more joyful future. Through Tourmaline’s practice, the past, present, and future intermingle in surreal ways.