Artist, Garrett Bradley: When I started this project, I was looking at Lime Kiln Club Field Day. I was looking at this source material from a perspective of regard and encouragement and excitement for the joy and the pleasure and the power that it must have taken to create something like this. This film was made in 1914, just several years after Plessy versus Ferguson, which happened in 1896. 1896 was also the same year that the modern-day projector was invented.
So what you had was the beginning of Jim Crow, you had people being separated, but you also had technology bringing people together for the first time. When you think about Lime Kiln Club Field Day being possibly the very first account of an integrated production of white people and Black people working together toward a sort of singular Black vision, it's profound.
Pleasure and joy are things that I talk a lot about with America. I both wanted to evoke and celebrate what I saw in Lime Kiln Club Field Day, where you really get a sense that people are having fun. And they look great. And even though Bert Williams is wearing Blackface no one else around him is. And to imagine what that must have taken in 1913 to ensure that is not something to be dismissed.
I wanted to evoke the same thing. But I also wanted to show that these levels of generosity and that pleasure and joy are important, not just for the sake of it, but because they are powerful and critical and mundane even forms of resistance. And so while this work is an homage to and evoking a work that happened in the turn of the century, it is I hope, also timeless.That it connects us with our own past with the present and might even to a certain extent offer a sort of nostalgia for a future.
