{"id":223621,"date":"2026-05-07T18:37:29","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T18:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/223621\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T18:37:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T18:37:29","slug":"inside-the-artist-peter-bradleys-upstate-new-york-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/223621\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Artist Peter Bradley\u2019s Upstate New York Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

SOMETIME IN THE late 1980s, the artist Peter Bradley<\/a> was driving around upstate New York. As he remembers it, he was with his friend the musician Eleana Tee Cobb, whom he\u2019d met years prior through Miles Davis. At one point, they passed an abandoned stone house, and Bradley felt compelled to go inside. After speaking with the owner, who lived on the farm up the road and was surprised by his interest \u2014 the house had no running water, heat or electricity and needed huge amounts of work besides \u2014 he started renting the property with a view to buying it, which he and his wife, Debra Roskowski-Bradley, now 69, did in 1997. Another friend, the jazz drummer Art Blakey, would ask him, \u201cWho the hell wants a gray house?\u201d Bradley recalls, but at 85, he still lives there with Roskowski-Bradley, a retired fashion designer.<\/p>\n

A simple Georgian design with two bedrooms, rows of sash windows on the front and a side-gabled roof, the roughly 3,000-square-foot, two-story structure was built for a Dutch family in the mid-18th century. It\u2019s in the town of Saugerties, west of the Hudson River and east of the Catskill Mountains. This promised a very different sort of existence from the one Bradley knew in Manhattan, where he\u2019d arrived in 1960 from Detroit. When a job installing art at the Guggenheim Museum led to one selling it at Perls Galleries, which specialized in works by Pablo Picasso, Fernand L\u00e9ger and Georges Braque \u2014\u00a0\u201cbetter than Picasso,\u201d who had a \u201cbig mouth,\u201d says Bradley \u2014 he became one of the city\u2019s first Black art dealers. In 1971, with the backing of the collectors John and Dominique de Menil, he curated \u201cThe De Luxe Show\u201d at a defunct movie theater in Houston\u2019s Fifth Ward. It featured work by Black abstract artists, including Bradley himself, alongside that of their white peers and was among the first racially integrated exhibitions in the United States. Bradley was part of the second wave of color field painters, who believed that, as the art world increasingly privileged figurative and representational art, color alone could reflect and elicit emotion. Early works of his appeared in a 1968 group show at MoMA and the 1973 Whitney Biennial, and he had multiple solo shows at Andr\u00e9 Emmerich Gallery.<\/p>\n

He navigated New York\u2019s art scene at a time when it was deeply segregated, experiencing both racism \u2014 when he did \u201cThe De Luxe Show,\u201d someone started a rumor that he was going to steal the artists\u2019 works \u2014 and financial instability. In 1989, after a long legal battle, he was evicted from the former firehouse in Chinatown he shared with his then-wife, the artist Suzanne McClelland, and their young daughter, Garrett Bradley, now a filmmaker based in New Orleans. The Saugerties house, then, wasn\u2019t merely a place to stay; as Garrett puts it, \u201cIt was a restarting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bradley dug a well, replaced windows and ripped out most of the floor between the second story and the attic, which had become a haven for critters. (For a while, he lived with a baby raccoon, who\u2019d do acrobatics for the neighbors\u2019 kids.) The artist respected the house\u2019s past \u2014 he believes, given the history of infrastructure in the region and the fact that slavery wasn\u2019t abolished in New York until 1827, it was built by enslaved people \u2014 but wasn\u2019t afraid to overwrite the architecture in places. With the help of two friends, he cut through a two-foot-thick exterior wall to connect the cellar kitchen to a grotto that functioned as a cistern. He wanted to turn the space into a cigar lounge, but it kept filling with water, so he left it as an indoor pond. He also built a greenhouse on the ground floor and planted a tulip garden in the front yard.<\/p>\n

To boost natural light in the house, Bradley installed skylights in the roof and metal grates in the floors \u2014 the wrought-iron ones in the sitting room previously encased tree trunks on sidewalks in Greenwich Village. Throughout, the home\u2019s raw, rustic quality has been blended with the similarly raw but more industrial spirit of an artist\u2019s loft: In the kitchen, exposed beams run parallel to a five-foot-wide fireplace, and rectangular floodlights shine on stainless-steel countertops procured from restaurant depots on the Bowery.<\/p>\n

In the living room, in addition to a refurbished Bastiano sofa covered in teal wool velour and a pink-and-green painting by Bradley, there\u2019s a black-and-white photograph of light on water by his old friend Adger Cowans, who used to work at Life magazine with Gordon Parks. On the other side of the room is a lithograph of a sun with a face by Alexander Calder, whose work Bradley sold at Perls \u2014 \u201cTo Peter Bradley\u201d is written in faded pencil at the bottom \u2014 and an elephant skull Bradley got in South Africa, where he traveled in the mid-1980s to help establish the Thupelo Workshop, which sought to provide a space for artists during apartheid. There\u2019s also a West African mask Bradley bought from Merton Simpson, a fellow artist and uptown dealer who specialized in tribal art.<\/p>\n

On the second floor are several objects from earlier chapters of Bradley\u2019s history. While reinforcing the fireplace in the main bedroom, he pressed an ebony airplane model he\u2019d had since childhood into the wet cement. He\u2019s long been fascinated by planes and rocket ships, and it\u2019s not lost on him that his paintings, which he makes on the floor and which are characterized by billowed pools and raised ridges of pigment, have the look of mysterious worlds viewed from above.<\/p>\n

BORN IN 1940 and adopted by a woman named Edith Ramsey Strange, Bradley grew up in Connellsville, Pa. His mother earned money by doing laundry, taking in foster children (about 30 in total) and renting rooms to traveling musicians. That\u2019s how Bradley met Davis (whom Bradley\u2019s uncle once insinuated may have been his biological father), as well as other jazz legends, including Clifford Brown, Erroll Garner, Dizzy Gillespie and Blakey, whom Bradley would go on tour with as a manager in the \u201980s.<\/p>\n

After high school, Bradley went to Detroit and hung out with musicians: When he married his first wife, Grace Burney, he says, Aretha Franklin sang at their wedding. He studied for a few years at what was then known as the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts before boarding a bus to New York, where his first job was in a frame shop. In 1966, he enrolled at the Yale School of Art, but he dropped out two years later. He\u2019d clashed with his professors and felt reduced to his identity, from which he wanted his work to stand apart.<\/p>\n

In New York, he had a lively social circle that included the artists William T. Williams (they shared a studio in a building on Broadway), Joel Shapiro (who lived upstairs), Kenneth Noland (one floor down) and Larry Poons (whom Bradley affectionately calls Looney Tuney). \u201cHis environment and social life are such a big part of who he was and a part of his practice, in a certain way,\u201d says Garrett. She remembers there always being a lot of people around at the firehouse, and at the stone house, too: \u201cThey\u2019d sit around and drink beer and paint. That was the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2021, after decades of working in relative obscurity, Bradley signed with New York\u2019s Karma gallery, which in July will mount a survey of his paintings dating to the \u201970s. This fall, he\u2019ll be in a group show at MoMA PS1 called \u201cHard Art<\/a>,\u201d a term he coined to describe the works in \u201cThe De Luxe Show,\u201d by which he meant art that required serious engagement and was \u201cfree of obstruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nowadays, there are fewer artists and musicians passing through, but Bradley continues to look after the plants and to paint. \u201cI stayed with the art every day of my life,\u201d he says. On a chilly afternoon in March, the artist, who was dressed in overalls, a flannel jacket and a wool cap with flaps, sat feeding the wood-burning stove in the sitting room. Then he made his way to his studio, a newly constructed barnlike building located about 40 yards from the house, past a small forest of bamboo. Outside were a few of his sculptures, assemblages of steel pieces in different shapes; inside were stacks and racks of painted canvases. \u201cVery hip,\u201d he deemed one with a textured pink surface, and opined on what he viewed as the strongest parts of a new work \u2014 black splashed over yellow \u2014 that he wanted to crop. As if for inspiration, he selected a recording of Derek and the Dominos jamming with Duane Allman to play through the vintage speakers standing on the floor. Bradley likes to listen to music while he works, letting the sound guide his color choices and movements. \u201cHe\u2019s going to stay forever\u201d at this house, says Garrett, \u201ceven once he leaves this dimension.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SOMETIME IN THE late 1980s, the artist Peter Bradley was driving around upstate New York. As he remembers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[87860,10016,9,11,10,87861,87862,85265],"class_list":["post-223621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-bradley","tag-interior-design-and-furnishings","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-peter-1940","tag-saugerties-ny","tag-tsummertravel2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}