The Barnes Foundation presents Freedom Dreams

On view through August 9, 2026, the show is co-curated by James Claiborne, the Barnes family deputy director for community engagement; and Maori Karmael Holmes, the chief executive and artistic officer of BlackStar Projects. It is inspired by Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley's 2002 academic text, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. While some Freedom Dreams pieces showcase how the past informs the present, others take a page from Kelley's book and "produce a vision that enables us to see beyond our immediate ordeals.” These works, all appearing in a Philly museum for the first time, look at what Black culture has experienced over the past 250 years in this country, and face a future where those facets are celebrated and recognized.

A trend toward Black joy

This show joins an increasing trend among Black creatives who highlight Black joy over Black sorrow. In his preface, Dr. Kelly asks, "How do we transcend bitterness and cynicism and embrace love, hope, and an all-encompassing dream of freedom, especially in these rough times?" and ponders "what kind of world do we want to struggle for?" Many of the Philly-area exhibitions I reviewed in the past few years have increasingly celebrated Black triumphs over tragedy, including Ruth E. Carter: Afro-Futurism in Costume Design (on view at AAMP through September 6, 2026), the Winterthur Museum's 2025 Afric-American Picture Gallery, and Delaware Art Museum's 2024 There Is a Woman in Every Color. Freedom Dreams fits perfectly into this increasing focus on cultural positivity within the Black American experience.

The Barnes show features five very different artists: Garrett Bradley, Ja'Tovia Gary, David Hartt, Arthur Jafa, and Tourmaline. Despite their varying approaches, the universal theme of each digital video surrounds positively accepting all facets of Black life while offering possibilities for moving forward.

The future is up to us

My favorite videos include Arthur Jafa's seven-minute single-channel digital video, Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), and Garrett Bradley's 23-minute multi-channel video installation America.

Love is the Message combines Civil Rights images, social-media dances, images of outer space, Black celebrities such as Jimi Hendrix, and numerous videos of police brutality against unlikely suspects, including a middle-aged woman driving with her family later interspliced with images of children, teenagers, and even toddlers harassed and physically beaten by those sworn to protect them. In pulling together seemingly disparate images, Jafa visually connects media representations of Black culture from the white supremacist 1915 film Birth of a Nation to contemporary frat parties. The piece lets us look at the past and present, and then abruptly and impactfully ends without offering a final message, implying that the future is up to us to identify.

An innovative visual chronology

Similarly, Bradley's brilliantly staged America incorporates archival footage of the 1914 silent picture Lime Kiln Club Field Day. She intersplices the archival images with contemporary monochromatic shorts recreating early 20th-century Black American life. She undercuts the more questionable scenes created in Lime Kiln Club Field Day (based on a story collection written by white journalist Charles Bertrand Lewis mocking Black American society) with more positive images portraying contemporary Black classical musicians or athletes. Although Lime Kiln Club questionably placed its Caribbean American lead Bert Williams in blackface, it also includes slices of Black life portrayed by its all-Black cast, including the Harlem-based Darktown Follies stage company.

By presenting what she calls a “visual chronology of history” through the slice-of-life snippets, Bradley emphasizes how Black Americans potentially lived trauma free at each point in time. The entire film is innovatively projected onto four white flags suspended in the room’s center with the sounds of nature (water, wind, and rain) interspersed with violins. In contrasting the past with the present and negative images with positive ones, Bradley truly showcases Black people at each stage of American culture, including baton twirlers, Negro league players, church matriarchs, an all-Black horse cavalry, and an all-Black Last Supper.

Intriguing shorts

The remaining three shorts are equally intriguing, and left me with positive feelings. Hartt, a Canadian transplant, focuses on contemporary Black Americana by examining homes and beauty-supply shops in the historically Black Watts neighborhood with his On Exactitude in Science (2021). My favorite part was the grainy, digitized effect that spatially suspended some of the architectural spaces. Unfortunately, the acoustic score frequently overpowers his voiceover.

Tourmaline’s Pollinator (2022) interweaves archival footage of Black trans activist Marsha Johnson’s homegoing with more polished images of the artist herself wearing floral crowns as homage to Johnson. My only complaint is that the contemporary images lack the same visual texture as the archival images. Finally, Gary’s 26-minute single-channel video Quiet as It’s Kept (2023) definitely needs to be watched from the start to the end to connect all of the images in the video and then relate it to the overarching exhibition theme.

Persistent, ordinary, and positive

The Barnes commissioned Freedom Dreams in celebration of the 250th anniversary of this country. Just as the US always remains in flux, this exhibition shows how representations and understandings of Black American culture have changed over the years. You might not like all the shorts, but they showcase how social media captures pertinent cultural events. While each digital short remains distinctly different, they appear unified by focusing less on past trauma and more in portraying Black American culture as persistent (here since the country’s founding), ridiculously ordinary (from the kitchen and beyond), amazingly positive (from college students enjoying frat life and Jimi Hendrix cutting a rug to people picnicking at the beach), beautifully botanical, and highly forward-facing.

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