Artist 211
Mark Bradford Painting and Collage Cityscapes Mark Bradford (born 1961) is an African-American artist who is known for his grid-like abstract paintings combining collage with paint. His work often displays the atrocities and struggles of race and poverty. Bradford grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a family of hairdressers. From early on, he used the materials found around salons, including the paper rectangles used for permanents, bobby pins, and hair dyes. Over time, his art making grew to include video, installation, and photographs alongside his continued interest in printmaking and collage.
Bradford describes his work: “Think about all the white noise out there in the streets: all the beepers and blaring culture—cell phones, amps, chromed-out wheels, and synthesizers. I pick up a lot of that energy in my work, from the posters, which act as memory of things pasted and things past. You can peel away the layers of papers and it’s like reading the streets through signs.” Bradford transforms materials scavenged from the street into wall-size collages and installations that respond to the impromptu networks—underground economies, migrant communities, or popular appropriation of abandoned public space—that emerge within a city.
Drawing from the diverse cultural and geographic makeup of his southern Californian community, Bradford’s work is as informed by his personal background as a third-generation merchant there as it is by the tradition of abstract painting developed worldwide in the twentieth century. Bradford’s videos and map-like, multilayered paper collages refer not only to the organization of streets and buildings in downtown Los Angeles, but also to images of crowds, ranging from civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s to contemporary protests concerning immigration issues.
“For me, it's always a detail—a detail that points to a larger thing,” Mark Bradford observes of his process. “I start to imagine what it points to, and that's when my imagination really goes.”
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Sources Consulted: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Bradford https://www.thebroad.org/art/mark-bradford https://art21.org/artist/mark-bradford/
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