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  • Artist Statement
  • Mark Bradford (bio)

I’m not about forcing equivalences and I don’t need linear histories, connections, or practices. With my painting and the ideas I’ve developed around it, I’ve always just pushed forward. Abstraction gave me a space to do that, to speak out the side of my neck, to practice a form of indirect speaking. At the same time, I wanted to use humble materials like paper, but to elevate those materials to the same height as painting, since collage is always considered a lesser art in the history of modernism. I just really thought that I could put all of those things together and push them forward as a transparent investigation of myself and of my process, which gave me the freedom to dismantle normative archetypal narratives and hierarchies within both modernism and black culture.

… abstraction allows me to stumble around and say, “Well, I think,” “I’m not sure,” “I might,” or “Maybe,” even as the works I’m putting out feel much more sure, more “front door.” Personally, I’ve never felt comfortable going in the front door; I’ve always liked side doors, windows, back doors, like sneaking into the back of a club—that also gave me some freedom.

I’ve often wondered how and why I came to use paper. I knew that I didn’t want to use the traditional materials because I did not want to dislodge a social conversation. Adding a political title wouldn’t have worked for who I was in the world that I was living in; that just didn’t feel like enough. So, I gravitated to the idea of paper, but I came to it in a very strange way because I never saw paper as paper. I always saw it as frozen pigment. I mean, a stack of blue paper is simply pigment that’s been isolated, because it had to be liquid at some point. I thought “Oh, well, I just need to release it. I just need to wet this paper so the color is freed.” So the first thing that I was very much interested in was actually interrogating the materials that we use, our language of engagement before anything else. In my case, I had to soften the paper so I could use it, so immediately all the paper went into water. And I didn’t always use paper from the streets. I used store-bought paper that was big blanks of colors—blues, reds, and yellows. I was always curious why people never saw it that way. [End Page 810]


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Mark Bradford, Promise Land (2012) Mixed media collage on canvas (102” x 144”)


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Mark Bradford, We May Be Running Out of a Past (2012) Mixed media collage on canvas (102” x 144”)

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Mark Bradford, Kryptonite (2006) Mixed media collage on canvas (98” x 118 ½”)

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Mark Bradford, Scorched Earth (2006) Mixed media collage on canvas (94 ½” x 118”)

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Mark Bradford

MARK BRADFORD (b. 1961) was born and reared in South Los Angeles, where his mother owned and operated a beauty salon. When he was eleven years of age, she, while still running her LA hair salon, moved her family to the predominately white Santa Monica, where Mark Bradford experienced a different world. When his mother retired, he transformed her old Leimert Park hair salon into a studio, where he still continues to work as a visual artist. In 1995, he received the BFA, and in 1997 the MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. Since that time, he has received a number of awards and other honors for his paintings, collages, and installations—for example, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2002), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003), the Bucksbaum Award (2006), the United States Artists Fellowship (2006), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), the Wexner Center Residency Award in the Visual Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts (The Ohio State University, 2009–2010), and a Joan Mitchell Foundation...

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