Diana Pumpelly Bates and Peter Bradley Bring ’60s Vibes Back to the Bundy Modern

Jazz, more than many mediums, fosters a strange synchronicity. Improvised riffs seem to set out in frenetic new directions, then come back together to meet in unexpected, sometimes quieter ways. That quality echoes through “Unity Revolution: The Color is the Message,” this summer’s show at the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield, where the artists’ biographies resonate as much as their work.

The exhibition pairs Diana Pumpelly Bates and Peter Bradley, both of whom are Black artists in their eighties (Bradley was born in 1940, Pumpelly Bates in 1938) who became known for their abstract paintings and sculpture in the 1960s and ’70s. Neither had the sustained career success they might’ve enjoyed without some of the racist headwinds they encountered early on. More recently, both have drawn critical attention from curators, gallerists and filmmakers eager to bring their work into the public eye.

That includes Bridget R. Cooks, a curator and professor at the University of California, Irvine, who proposed showing Pumpelly Bates’ work at the Bundy Modern. Cooks first learned about the artist when she recorded an oral history with her for the Getty Research Institute. Since then, she said at the opening reception, “This was the dream: to be able to see her work back here where she taught school, where she made most of the paintings in the show — here in Vermont.”

More specifically, Cooks meant right here in Waitsfield. Pumpelly Bates’ great-grandfather was one of Vermont’s most decorated Civil War heroes. Her grandparents purchased a farm in Waitsfield, just down the road from the Bundy Modern. Her mother, Amelie, was raised in New York City and married Harlem prizefighter John Bates. Growing up, Diana Pumpelly Bates spent summers in the Mad River Valley, along with some of her parents’ friends, including Ralph Ellison, who started writing Invisible Man on the Bates farm.

Pumpelly Bates raised her children there in the 1960s, after separating from their father, jazz musician Art Blakey. She taught art lessons at the Bundy when it was a school and had a solo exhibition at the Bundy Museum — in the same gallery as the current show — in 1969. She later moved to Northern California, where she eventually became known for public sculptures throughout the San Francisco area.

Meanwhile, Blakey was good friends with another young painter: Peter Bradley. Bradley was raised in a Pennsylvania boarding house where jazz legends such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane regularly stayed on their way to Pittsburgh. He later became associate director at Perls, an exclusive art dealer in New York City, where he sold works by Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder to celebrities such as Paul Newman and Greta Garbo.

In 1971, he curated “The De Luxe Show” in Houston, one of the first racially integrated art exhibitions in the country. June Anderson, who runs the Bundy Modern out of her home with her husband, Wendell, and who cocurated the exhibition with him and Cooks, said she started a spreadsheet to track all of Bradley’s wild connections.

Strangely, Pumpelly Bates and Bradley had never met before this show, but their works seem like old friends. Visitors first encounter Pumpelly Bates’ “Untitled (Red and Orange),” circa 1970, a 6-by-6-foot diamond-shaped canvas. A cluster of red circular forms, like a zygote or a chrysanthemum, floats on a saturated orange background. In all of her paintings, Pumpelly Bates uses the texture of the paint to define forms within a hue. What may look from one angle like a single mass of red resolves into smaller circles from a different one, as light reflects off paint the artist has scraped, perhaps with a squeegee or knife, into circular forms.

In other works, such as “Untitled (Gold and White),” circa 1970, Pumpelly Bates further defines her shapes with narrow outlines. These offer a slight but unmistakeable hint at figuration. Off-center circles and rounded rectangles become a family, heads tilted just so, bodies clustered together.

Where Pumpelly Bates uses limited but intense color to define form, Bradley wields texture and composition to explore color. Since the 1960s, the artist has been making color field paintings, in which the paint soaks into the canvas, mixing and melding and taking its own direction. With Peter Bradley, a 2023 documentary about the artist by filmmaker Alex Rappoport now available on PBS, shows Bradley at work on his property in Saugerties, N.Y., stretching canvases outdoors, spraying them with a garden hose and pouring paint over them with buckets.

Bradley always listens to music when he paints, generally jazz — Wendell Anderson said Miles Davis was on when the curators visited his studio — and his paintings reflect that. The paint seems like it’s still in motion, with heavier patches slowing the pace and splashes speeding things up. All of the paintings are titled after jazz compositions. In the documentary, Bradley explains that “every sound has a color.”

Unlike Pumpelly Bates’ paintings, which are all from the 1960s and ’70s, only one of Bradley’s works — “Belle Coast,” 1973 — is from that period; the rest have been made in the past five years. Though the oldest has a more subdued palette, with a field of grayish-peachy-yellowish green, it’s clear that Bradley’s artistic concerns — texture, flow and, above all, color — haven’t changed over a half-century.

That’s particularly visible in “Turn Out the Stars II,” an 82-by-86-inch canvas where a dense pink blob sits atop drifting wine-colored stains, creating distance between foreground and background. As in many of his works, shards of stuff — ash, paint, dried grass — have found a small foothold, complicating the surface and tempting the viewer to touch.

Both artists also present sculptures in the show. Bradley’s stainless steel “Albatross” and his steel-and-plastic “Empire” weld together cast-off odds and ends. Pumpelly Bates’ works in brass are definitive and confident, especially “Yoni,” the six-foot-high centerpiece of the main gallery, which frames the other works in an unmistakably female context.

Both artists’ stories are thankfully now being told. They launched careers in a period when Black artists were mainly being shown within the context of race and often weren’t welcomed into exhibitions about abstraction. Seeing their pieces in this modernist, 1960s gallery feels right. As June Anderson said, the Bundy, with its formal lines and unfettered space, was built for this work.

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2025.

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