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Peter Bradley

Born, 1940 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, USA

Peter Bradley was one of the artists included in Some American History, a bold and hugely important exhibition hosted by the Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston Texas, February 1971. It was in effect a major exhibition of work - a large multi-media installation - by Larry Rivers, supplemented with contributions by Bradley, Ellsworth Ausby, Frank Bowling, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Joe Overstreet, and William T. Williams. The exhibition was commissioned by the Menil Foundation, and sought to animate aspects of race within American history. The boldness of the exhibition owed much to the central presence within the exhibition of the work of Larry Rivers, a white Jewish artist whose practice frequently incorporated images of Black people and issues relating to African American history. As such, Some American History created a curatorial model that has still, thirty years on, not been widely embraced by a gallery network that by and large insists that only ‘Black’ artists ought to address ‘Black’ issues or ‘Black’ audiences. Slavery, lynchings, the skewed sexualisation of the Black woman, the poets and prophets of the Black Power movement, these and other subjects were boldly taken up by Rivers, in his distinctive Pop Art influences montages, mixed media pieces and assemblage sculptures.

For Some American History Peter Bradley contributed a mixed media construction, Marcus Garvey (1970), a work that made use of iconic images of Garvey, including one of the most celebrated, by James VanDerZee.