Bradley Petty

Bradley Petty is a Ph.D. student in Art History at SMU who specializes in Post-War and Contemporary Art from 1960 to the present. He received his M.A. in Art History from SMU with a thesis titled The Southwest Black Artists Collective: Kinship, Collectivity, and Afro-Modern Ecology in the Desert Southwest. His scholarship explores relationships among Black contemporary art, geography, public memory, architecture and regional identity in the American Southwest. Petty has presented research at Tulane University's Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference and participated as an Invited Scholar in the Roy Lichtenstein Study Day organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center in partnership with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. His writing has appeared in In Media Res, where he published Art Signals: The Rise of Black Art in Late 20th-Century Broadcast Television. His curatorial experience includes serving as the 2025 Curatorial Intern for Post-War and Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, where he supported research, interpretation and exhibition development. Petty is the recipient of the Moody School Mustang Fellowship and has received awards from the Point Foundation. Prior to graduate study, Petty served as a Field Artillery Officer in the United States Army.