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THE JOURNAL
A DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER'S BLOG
NEW YORK CHARLOTTESVILLE VALENCIA

FEATURE ESSAY
The numbers do not fully absorb. As of this writing, 1,783 cultural heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Among them, 46 have been completely erased. The Ministry of Culture counts 346 artists and 132 media workers dead. PEN Ukraine had already reached 102 cultural figures killed by the end of 2024, and the count has not stopped. These are not collateral casualties. They are the point.
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Andrés Waissman — Painter of Multitudes.
Waissman (2010), directed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley for Heritage Film Project, offers an extended portrait of the Argentine artist Andrés Waissman at work in his Palermo studio. The film traces the origins of his Multitudes series — figures of nomadism, immigration, and silent crowds — and the multicultural ancestry behind his most recognized body of work.

Heritage Film Project
Jun 104 min read


Edouard Manet, and the Foreign Eye on Imperial Brazil
Before Brazil painted itself, the world saw it through other people's hands. Debret's three folios, a sixteen-year-old Manet on a school ship, and the foreign eye on imperial Rio.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 224 min read


J.J. Lankes: Among Poets and Rebels — Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson
A documentary portrait of American woodcut master Julius John Lankes — filmed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley and Soledad Liendo — tracing a pastoral vision of agrarian America, a lifelong friendship with Robert Frost, and a defiant career undone at last by the Cold War machine it had always refused to serve.

Heritage Film Project
May 189 min read


Modern Cuban Painters, Revisited
A Tuesday afternoon between meetings at the Frost Art Museum at FIU, where Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York: Revisited returns the landmark 1944 MoMA exhibition to American walls eighty-two years later.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 143 min read


Paul Chaleff and the Point of Transition
Robert C. Morgan visits Paul Chaleff's Pine Plains studio and finds a sculptor working the fault line where two dimensions become three — where a vessel becomes a sculpture, where function dissolves into form. A meditation on clay as a tactile counterweight to the digital fatigue of our age.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 293 min read


Paul Chaleff: Form, Shape, Life — Notes for a Walk in the Park
Paul Chaleff occupies a position in contemporary American art that resists easy classification. Working in ceramics, yet rarely confined by the expectations of the medium, his work moves between object and sculpture, between function and form — propositions rather than tools — and into a philosophical territory rooted in existential inquiry.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 223 min read
Vision of Spain: In Documentary Mode. With Soriano, Montes-Bradley and Villalobos in the Rearview Mirror.
There is a room in the Hispanic Society of America, a museum so quietly extraordinary that even most New Yorkers have never set foot in it — where the walls tell a different story of Spain. Fourteen monumental canvases, each between twelve and fourteen feet tall, wrapping around you for nearly two hundred and thirty feet of painted Spain.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Apr 27 min read


Colonel Gray and the World Monuments Fund.
Colonel James A. Gray, the founder of the World Monuments Fund. She described him as a man who solved problems with quiet boldness—the kind who didn't just raise money but took action. In 1965, he founded what became WMF after pursuing ideas that seemed audacious at the time, like stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In 1968, he arranged to bring an Easter Island moai to New York's Seagram Building to remind the world what was at stake—heritage, memory, humanity itself.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Oct 6, 20252 min read


A Tribute to Humberto Calzada
This is my tribute to Humberto Calzada: Cuban, American, painter, friend, brother in all the ways that matter. A man who understood that sometimes the only way to go home is to create it, brush stroke by brush stroke, until the canvas holds everything you remember about love.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Aug 23, 20255 min read


“The Art of Joy Brown” Selected for Competition at 2025 Mystic Film Festival
“The Art of Joy Brown” Selected for Competition at 2025 Mystic Film Festival.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 30, 20252 min read


Louis Comfort Tiffany: The Master of Collaborative Artistry
When we think of Louis Comfort Tiffany, our minds inevitably turn to those iconic stained glass lamps with their iridescent dragonfly wings and poppy blossoms, or perhaps the jewel-toned windows that grace countless churches and private residences. Yet this singular focus on his most commercially successful works has obscured a far more complex and ambitious artistic legacy—one that reveals Tiffany as a pioneering collaborator in America’s emerging vocabulary of interior arch

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 25, 20256 min read


Reconstructing Havana
In 2009, I created a film about Cuban-American painter Humberto Calzada. What emerged was more than a biographical portrait—it became a meditation on exile, memory, and the quiet power of art to reclaim what was lost.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Jul 3, 20252 min read


Piccirilli Factor at The Met
The Piccirilli Factor at The Met

Heritage Film Project
Dec 12, 20241 min read


The Legacy of Bill and Mary Carroll
We always knew it was a story that needed to be told, and Eduardo has done it so masterfully.

Mary Carroll
Nov 13, 20242 min read


Art, Controversy, and Compromise: The Piccirilli Studio and George Grey Barnard at the Pennsylvania State Capitol
An important sequence in The Piccirilli Project explores the collaboration between the Piccirilli and George Grey Barnard.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 28, 20241 min read


Dave Matthews Evokes Edward Thomas
Edward was a disciple of Richard Crozier, another artist I deeply admire. Edward and Dave were very close friends, and when you visit Dave,

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 15, 20241 min read


A Memorable Day with Joseph D'Oronzio
After nearly a year of working together, Joseph D'Oronzio and I finally sat down, quietly, with a camera between us to record his memories o

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Sep 4, 20241 min read


Dave Matthews Joins Documentary on Sculptor Joy Brown
Dave Mathews, a longtime admirer of Brown’s work, recorded an insightful and heartfelt conversation with Montes-Bradley.

Heritage Film Project
Aug 21, 20242 min read


The Rockefeller Center and Piccirilli | Watch Video
The murals designed by Attilio for the Rockefeller Center represent a continuation of the modernist style he cultivated.

Heritage Film Project
Jun 16, 20242 min read


Documenting Joy Brown's Journey
Charlottesville, Virginia -- We are pleased to announce a new collaboration in China to document the final stages of Joy Brown's work.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley
May 18, 20242 min read
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