The US artist and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Garrett Bradley has been announced as the winner of the 2023 Art & Film prize, which is awarded by Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum. The Eye Art & Film award has been running since 2015 and was first won by the German filmmaker, artist and pioneer of the essay documentary Hito Steyerl. It is awarded to artists for an standout body of work that lies at the intersection of art and film.
Bradley was chosen by an international jury of six including Chris Dercon, the managing director of Paris’s Fondation Cartier, the Lesotho artist and film director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, and the Indian artist Nalini Malani. The award comes with a cash prize of €30,000 (supported by the Dutch arts, architecture and science body Ammodo) and an exhibition at Eye Filmmuseum. Bradley will formally receive the accolade at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, which will be hosted at the museum next week (Friday 10 November).
Still from Garrett Bradley’s America (2019)
Courtesy the artist
“Garrett Bradley is a dream winner” says Bregtje van der Haak, the director of Eye Filmmuseum and jury chair in a statement. Van der Haak commended Bradley’s “courageous, visually compelling work” tackling racism and exclusion as well as the filmmaker’s experimental cinematography. “Her films and installations draw us in, challenge us, stir our souls and get us thinking about the world,” van der Haak says.
Bradley’s debut documentary feature Time (2020) made history when it earned her the best director award in the US documentary category at Sundance—Bradley becoming the first Black woman in the history of the film festival to receive the prize. Time follows Sibil Fox Richardson —also known as “Fox Rich”—as she fights for her husband Rob’s release from a 60-year prison sentence he was serving following a bank robbery. The film went on to be nominated for an Academy Award in the best documentary feature category, however it lost out on the Oscar to American Factory (2019), directed by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar.
Still from Garrett Bradley’s Time (2020)
Courtesy the artist
Bradley’s latest exhibition was a short run of her 2019 video work AKA (2019) at Sydney’s COMA gallery in March. Last year, she exhibited Projects 111: Garrett Bradley—a film tracking pivotal moments in Black history through 12 black-and-white vignettes—at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Between 2019 and February this year, the exhibition Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody was hosted by institutions including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Momentary in Bentonville, Arizona.
