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• 1 media/Bradford_629c-MB03.jpg media/Bradford_629c-MB03.jpg 2020-08-18T19:55:12+00:00 Mark Bradford 20 Untitled, lithograph, 2003 image_header 2023-09-06T17:51:03+00:00

  About the Artist 

  Los Angeles native Mark Bradford is one of America’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, and his work is included in major collections worldwide. Bradford earned a BFA in 1995 and an MFA in 1997 from the California Institute of the Arts. In the years between high school and art school, Bradford worked in his mother’s beauty shop in Los Angeles, and much of his early work pays homage to his mother, her profession, and the community in which he grew up.  
  
  Working across the genres of painting and collage, photography, sculpture, and installation, Bradford addresses issues such as equity and inclusion in the art market, systemic racism, and divides of gender and class. While he concedes that he relies “on the subject matter to do a little bit of the political work,” he values the open-endedness of abstraction: “I also give myself the freedom of abstraction to go wherever I need to go so that I’m not a spokesperson for something.”     
  
  Bradford is the recipient of many awards, including the Bucksbaum Award (2006); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2002). He has been included in major exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2006), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003), and many more. He has participated in the twenty-seventh Bienal de São Paulo (2006); the Whitney Biennial (2006); and “inSite: Art Practices in the Public Domain,” San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico (2005). In 2017 he represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. Bradford’s work appears in most of the world’s leading museums of contemporary art, including LACMA; the Tate, London; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
   

  About the Works 

  Mark Bradford finds his materials in the everyday environment of Los Angeles where he grew up and still makes his home. He is an unapologetic Angeleno, relishing his perspective “from on the fringe.” He was raised by his mother, Janice Banks, who worked in beauty shops in Los Angeles for forty years. He is careful to call them beauty shops, rather than salons; they belonged to a particular time and place, rooted within their African American communities. Bradford honors them in these early lithographs he calls “social abstractions,” as they harness the aesthetics of abstraction for the purpose of critique.
  
  
  As an emerging artist, he was unable to afford expensive artists’ paints and canvases and so found his materials in “the humble stuff” of his everyday environment; he still proudly procures paint from the Home Depot. One day, on the floor of his mother’s salon, he noticed a discarded tissue-thin end paper lying in the light and adopted a new “found material.” End papers were used to wrap around the ends of hair before winding it onto rollers. They were cheap. He could buy a box of 200 for 50 cents. He found if he burned the edges with a match (he progressed to a blow torch), he could make a grid, then add a thin wash of hair dye over the surface, then add another layer. The result was a work of abstract art that engaged with the world of Black community, ideals of beauty, and ongoing debates about natural versus chemically straightened or waved hair. This tiny piece of translucent paper was a window onto a much wider issue. “I liked the social fabric they represented, and so I built this vocabulary, using only paper.”
  

  From the Artist

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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