Bradley Petty

Ph.D. student, Art History

Research Interests: Bradley Petty is a Ph.D. student in Art History at Southern Methodist University specializing in Post-War and Contemporary Art since 1960. 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 the 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, supporting research, interpretation, and exhibition development. He serves as a convener of the SMU Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute (DCII) Research Cluster, South Dallas Cinema Project: Black Film, Public Humanities, and Community-Based Engagement, alongside the project's founder, Professor Devon "Vonnie" Smith. Prior to graduate study, Petty served as a Field Artillery Officer in the United States Army.

Road to the Moody School: Although Bradley Petty encountered art history as an undergraduate, he did not immediately recognize it as the discipline that could unite his intellectual interests. Years spent living in the Southwestern United States, coupled with his longstanding commitment to civic engagement, prompted enduring questions about how communities inhabit place, preserve memory, and construct regional identity. Those interests crystallized in 2023 when he encountered Ashanti Chaplin's multidisciplinary installation Dust to Dirge: An Earth Elegy in ArtNow: The Soul Is a Wanderer at Oklahoma Contemporary, an exhibition that explored landscape as a site of history, identity, and cultural imagination. Graduate study at SMU provided the methodological framework to pursue those questions through art history, particularly at the intersection of visual culture, architecture, and the built environment. His master's research became an opportunity to examine how Black artists redefine the desert Southwest not as a peripheral landscape, but as a site of kinship, cultural production, and belonging. That intellectual progression continues to shape his scholarship, which investigates how artists produce new understandings of geography, public memory, and the cultural identities that define the Southwestern United States.