The Barnes Foundation Presents Freedom Dreams

Featuring film, video, and installation works by five contemporary artists exploring Black American history and identity

On view April 12–August 9, 2026
Press Preview: Wednesday, April 8, 9:30–11:30 am

Philadelphia, PA, January 22, 2026—In spring 2026, the Barnes Foundation will present 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 Deputy Director for Community 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.

On view from April 12 through August 9, 2026, in the Roberts Gallery, Freedom Dreams is sponsored by Comcast NBCUniversal.

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: 8:04 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: 29:03 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 (2024) 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.

ABOUT 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.

ABOUT THE CO-CURATORS
James Claiborne is Fleischner Family Deputy Director for Community Engagement at the Barnes. A program and visual arts curator and educator with 20 years of experience, Claiborne previously served the Barnes as Curator for Public Programming and worked as director of programming at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Prior roles include positions at Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Visit Philadelphia, and First Person Arts. Claiborne has taught audience development in the arts at Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. As an independent curator, he has organized exhibitions on Deborah Willis, James Dupree, Amber Art and Design, Richard J. Watson, Ruth Naomi Floyd, and Barkley L. Hendricks, among others. Claiborne has served as a board member or adviser to organizations including FringeArts, Mural Arts Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund. Since joining the Barnes, Claiborne has curated and co-curated significant projects such as the multimedia performance work John Dowell: A Public Intimate Space and the exhibition William Edmondson: A Monumental Visionexhibition and its related performance series Returning to Before, choreographed by Brendan Fernandes. He also organized entrəpē, a special program featuring Mickalene Thomas and Grammy Award–winning jazz musician Terri Lyne Carrington.

Maori Karmael Holmes is a filmmaker, writer, and curator and the Chief Executive and Artistic Officer of BlackStar Projects. She founded BlackStar Film Festival in 2012 and has organized film programs at Anthology Film Archives; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Penn Live Arts at Annenberg Center; the Underground Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has organized the exhibitions Rashid Zakat: Uses of the Ironic (2024, Asian Arts Initiative), Terence Nance: Swarm (2023, ICA Philadelphia), Assemblage(2019, Pearlstein Gallery), and Lossless (2017, Pearlstein Gallery). Her directorial works, including her feature documentary Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip-Hop, have screened internationally. She has also directed and produced works for Colorlines.com, Visit Philadelphia, and musicians India.Arie, Mike Africa, Jr., and Wayna. She has produced several films, including Iyabo Kwayana’s By Water (2023). Holmes received her MFA in film and media arts from Temple University and her BA in history from American University, with formative training at Howard University and the California Institute of the Arts. She was mediamaker-in-residence at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania from 2020 to 2023, a 2022 Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures Fellow, a 2019–20 Soros Equality Fellow, a 2016 Just Films/Rockwood Fellow, and a 2014 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow. In 2023, she received the United States Artists Berresford Prize.

EXHIBITION BROCHURE
The exhibition will include an expanded-length brochure featuring essays by Dr. Kelli Morgan, founding executive director and CEO of the Black Artists Archive; Maya S. Cade, creator and curator of Black Film Archive and scholar-in-residence at the Library of Congress; and filmmaker Darol Olu Kae.

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION
Freedom Dreams is organized by the Barnes Foundation and co-curated by James Claiborne, Fleischner Family Deputy Director for Community Engagement at the Barnes, and Maori Karmael Holmes, filmmaker, writer, curator, and Chief Executive and Artistic Officer of BlackStar Projects.

Freedom Dreams is on view at the Barnes from April 12 to August 9, 2026.

Freedom Dreams is part of Philadelphia’s yearlong commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary in 2026. The celebration encompasses major sporting events, cultural exhibitions, and community programs that honor Philadelphia’s role as the birthplace of American democracy. For more information about this historic milestone year, visit philly2026.com.

EXHIBITION SPONSORS
Freedom Dreams is sponsored by Comcast NBCUniversal.

Meaningful support is provided by Margaret C. Hallenbeck, Margaret Harris and Phil Straus, Mark Haskins and Rebecca Craik, Arthur M. Kaplan and R. Duane Perry, Jennifer Rice and Michael Forman, and an anonymous donor.

Ongoing funding for exhibitions comes from the Christine and Michael Angelakis Exhibition Fund, Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Exhibition Fund, Lois and Julian Brodsky Exhibition Fund, Elaine W. Camarda and A. Morris Williams, Jr. Exhibition Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Christine and George Henisee Exhibition Fund, Aileen and Brian Roberts Exhibition Fund, and Tom and Margaret Lehr Whitford Exhibition Fund.

In addition, funding for all exhibitions comes from contributors to the Barnes Foundation Exhibition Fund:

Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, Joan Carter and John Aglialoro, Julia and David Fleischner, Victoria McNeil Le Vine, Leigh and John Middleton, Jeanette and Joe Neubauer, Aileen and Brian Roberts

John Alchin and Hal Marryatt, Lois and Julian Brodsky, N. Judith Broudy, Emily and Michael Cavanagh, Marianne N. Dean, Eugene and Michelle Dubay, Penelope P. Harris, Jones & Wajahat Family, Lisa D. Kabnick and John H. McFadden, Victor F. Keen and Jeanne Ruddy, Marguerite Lenfest, Maribeth and Steven Lerner, Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation, Hilarie and Mitchell Morgan, Cathy and Henry Nassau, The Park Family, Wendy and Mark Rayfield, Anne and Bruce Robinson, Adele K. Schaeffer, Katie and Tony Schaeffer, Donna and Jerry Slipakoff, Dr. and Mrs. Eugene E. Stark, Joan F. Thalheimer, Bruce and Robbi Toll, van Beuren Charitable Foundation, Kirsten White, and Randi Zemsky and Bob Lane.

ABOUT THE BARNES FOUNDATION
The Barnes is a nonprofit cultural and educational institution that shares its unparalleled art collection with the public, organizes special exhibitions, and presents programming that fosters new ways of thinking about human creativity. The Barnes collection is displayed in ensembles that integrate art and objects from across cultures and time periods, overturning traditional hierarchies and revealing universal elements of human expression. Home to one of the world’s finest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings—including the largest groups of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne in existence—the Barnes brings together renowned canvases by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Vincent van Gogh, alongside African, Asian, ancient, medieval, and Native American art as well as metalwork, furniture, and decorative art.

The Barnes was established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922 to “promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts and horticulture.” A visionary collector and pioneering educator, Dr. Barnes was also a fierce advocate for the civil rights of African Americans, women, and the economically marginalized. Committed to racial equality and social justice, he established a scholarship program to support young Black artists, writers, and musicians who wanted to further their education. Dr. Barnes became actively involved in the Harlem Renaissance, during which he collaborated with philosopher Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, the scholar and activist, to promote awareness of the artistic value of African art.

Since moving to Philadelphia in 2012, the Barnes has expanded its commitment to diversity, inclusion, and social justice, teaching visual literacy in groundbreaking ways; investing in original scholarship relating to its collection; and enhancing accessibility throughout every facet of its programs.

The Barnes is situated in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people. Read our Land Acknowledgment.

Hours and ticket prices are listed on our website.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION
Deirdre Maher, Director of Communications / 215.278.7160, press@barnesfoundation.org
Online press office: barnesfoundation.org/press