Andre Bradley lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Bradley’s artistic, curatorial, and photo book practices currently explore the subject of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the black community. He utilizes mixed and digital media, photography, and installation as forms of ideological resistance that foreground lived experience, against the background of art.
Bradley graduated from Image Text Ithaca and the Rhode Island School of Design’s Photography MFA programs. Bradley also completed coursework at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Curatorial Practice MFA program. Bradley was named a George Ciscle Scholar in Curatorial Practice during his studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Bradley received the T.C. Colley Award for Photographic Excellence during his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Bradley's first photo-book Dark Archives, I-41
was shortlisted for the Photo-Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles and the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award, both in 2016. Bradley was the inaugural fellow of the Arc Baltimore/Curatorial Practice Fellowship in 2019, a junior fellow at Image Text Ithaca in 2015, and an artist-in-residence at the Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image in 2016. Bradley’s work has been collected by public and private art institutions and libraries including the RISD Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Scripps College's Ella Strong Denison Library Rare Book Room.
CV
ART:
2020-PRESENT
2010-2020
Private Garden/Vacant Corner
2018 - Ongoing
PrivateGarden/Vacant Corner is a diptych that explores Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the black community. Hinging a photo book and video as the dyad products of a decade-long artistic practice in photography, writing, curatorial practice, and image text. In a forthcoming photobook fabricated to look and feel like a planter box, Bradley sets a trap for attention. Through poetics of social engagement, Bradley shares specific events, and at the same time creates metaphors and abstract, notions about traumatic experiences. He uses multiple "personas" -- he, I, etc. to tell a pathographic story.
In a joint video, these literary personas share one voice, foregrounding disassociation as a narrative device. Bradley allows viewers to experience disassociation through him. One voice narrates a video collage of archival photographs from the Library of Congress, portraits of black boys, landscape photographs, and a recent video of Philadelphia, cut with talking head footage of the artist reading from his poem Private Garden/Vacant Corner which gets its name from a landscape design solution proposed for vacant lots in disinvested areas of Philadelphia in the early 2000’s.
Group Exhibition:
The Performative Self-Portrait
RISD Museum of Art
The Performative Self-Portrait
RISD Museum of Art
2023
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This exhibition explores the work of photographers who turn the camera back upon themselves. From capturing themselves in shadows and reflections to trying on alternative or speculative identities, The Performative Self-Portrait explores the body as material and medium and photography as a vehicle to consider ways artists use self-portraiture to enact the self, question history, and articulate identity.
Made between 1930 and the present, works in the exhibition range from new acquisitions to older works on view for the first time.
Curated by Conor Moynihan, Assistant Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs, and Matthew Kluk, Brown PhD 2025, History of Art and Architecture.
What If Photography is Forgiveness?
“I Never Taught @ Brown!” (After Fred Moten)
I’m Here to Talk About Feelings
Gel ink, oil-based paint pen, alcohol-based marker, pencil on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper
“I Never Taught @ Brown!” (After Fred Moten)
I’m Here to Talk About Feelings
Gel ink, oil-based paint pen, alcohol-based marker, pencil on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper
2023
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