Introduction
Mark Bradford, an American visual artist, was born on November 20, 1961. He is a native of Los Angeles who attended the California Institute of the Arts, a private university in California. Bradford’s collaged paintings have been featured in exhibitions all around the world, and he also works with film, print, and installation (Hill et al. 45). Bradford is renowned for his substantial paintings that rigorously investigate the social and political potential of abstraction. The artist’s work, which he calls social abstraction, explores the political and environmental situations that continue to affect vulnerable communities disproportionately. Bradford has established a substantial body of work that clarifies contemporary topics around the world, the distortion and dread of LGBT identity, and entrenched racial discrimination in the United States within both current and historical contexts.
Activity and Successes
Many of Bradford’s works are made by stacking discovered objects; these materials include things like commercial posters, print media, comic strips, magazines, street signs, and endpapers. After graduating from the arts university in 1997, he has been using the technique of fusing social indices and cultural worlds by combining bits and pieces with pop culture debris. Bradford’s singular examination of societal conflicts, which can affect and motivate acts in the contemporary world, is reflected in the artist’s work across a wide range of media (Hankins and Aquin 54). Since Bradford’s work has had a strong impact domestically and internationally, he has been recognized as one of the most influential American modern artists.
Bradford is widely regarded as one of the most important and prominent painters of his period due to his keen perception and prodigious creativity. The United States Department of State awarded him the Medal of Arts in 2014, and in 2013 and 2009, he was named a national schoolman and received a MacArthur Fellowship prize, respectively. Bradford’s colossal, site-specific piece Pickett–Pettigrew–Trimble Charge at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden beside the National Mall in the District of Columbia, was unveiled in November of 2017.
He represented America at the 57th International Art Exhibition, Viva Arte Viva, with the work Tomorrow Is Another Day in 2017. The United States Embassy in London commissioned Bradford to create a work of art in 2018 to be shown exclusively at the embassy (Gogarty 532). The piece is titled ‘We the People,’ is made up of 32 panels, each 10 square feet in size, and depicts passages from the US Constitution.
Bradford has developed a strong sculptural practice, but his pieces of art and collages tend to get more attention during exhibitions. The first floor of the Long Museum is used for ‘Los Angeles,’ and it has the first display of Bradford’s 2008 Mithra outside of the US. Mithra 2008 is a huge sculpture that the artist originally envisioned for ‘P.1’ New Orleans. The ship-like design, modeled from conditioned timber boards rescued from the Hurricane Katrina devastation, is one of the highly recognizable site-particular public artworks displayed in modern times (Rappolt par. 1). Bradford alludes to the story of Noah’s ark while also providing a solution to the problems faced by a city still recovering from the destruction wrought by the flood of 2001 (Graham 4). Bradford’s work is unified by recurring themes of optimism and obliteration, community, and conflict, all of which are explored in this important new piece.
In his most recent series of large-scale paintings, completed in 2018 and 2019, Bradford attempts to deconstruct the civil upheaval witnessed in Los Angeles in the course of the Watts Rebellion of 1965. A sequence of low-range art that foreshadows and expands the expressions of this new body of work complements the large-scale installations (Auping 34). Bradford’s revolutionary use of both medium and subject matter in his paintings has ushered in fresh possibilities for the medium. His creations are messy sublime objects that may be interpreted in a variety of ways, including as maps, works of art, commentaries, monuments, and representations of existence (Griffin par. 8). They are made of paint, canvases, paper, cord, and other commonplace materials. They provide a fascinating dynamic between depth and breadth, structure and decoration, personality and setting, and time and place.
Bradford’s abstract paintings often take the form of grids and combine paint and collage. He uses gouging, tearing, shredding, gluing, power washing, and sanding tools to carve into paper layers and cords to create his works (Nawi par. 6). For the duration of his career, Bradford has been a collector of merchant posters or printed sheets, promoting services that are put in neighborhoods (Art21 00:01:50-00:02:06). Critics claim that the ads promote everything from legal help for immigration and child custody to gun displays to low-cost transitional housing, food aid, liability relief, wigs to occupations, DNA-based paternity assessment, and quick cash. By reflecting on his own perceptions as a gay man, Bradford occasionally weaves concepts of sexuality and masculinity into his art.
Major Works
Premised on the 1921 Tulsa racial murder, Bradford painted ‘Scorched Earth’ and ‘Black Wall Street’ in 2006. Bradford returned to the subject for the 2021 painting ‘Tulsa Gottdamn,’ commissioned for the massacre’s centennial commemoration. Orbit, a collage by Bradford, centers on a publication illustration of a basketball embedded in a maze of Los Angeles traffic grids. Orbit seems to be an overhead perspective of a warping, changing, and dying metropolis whose small, complex street networks cannot retain structural honor anymore and was created through the accumulated and reductive techniques of montage and décollage, mixed with paint. Bradford’s interpretation is highly equivocal, although it is reminiscent of Basquiat’s iconographies of black superstars (Gillespie 93). After all, the basketball’s aspirational meaning could signify a glimmer of optimism or a false claim of the quickest way out of the city.
Almost eight-foot broad and nine-foot high, Bradford’s 2008 piece, ‘A Truly Rich Man is One Whose Children Run into His Arms Even When His Hands Are Empty,’ is an impressive sight. Black art, netted with light flashes and slender reminds of the windscreens of vehicles destroyed in rebellions. If broken down into its constituent parts, it reveals the artist’s sultry, tactile technique in the slicing, sanding, lacquering, and pasting of discovered materials. Aside from painting and sculpture, Bradford also works with video and print. The ark-like art in his 2008 work, Mithra, is 70 by 20 by 25 feet and is made out of repurposed plywood barricade fencing (Long 49).
As part of Prospect New Orleans, a show of contemporary art honoring the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Bradford had it brought to the Big Easy. Later the same year, for the 55th Carnegie International, he restaged a work he had originally made on top of the Steve Turner art establishment, located right across the road from Hancock Park. At the 2012 art museum, Los Angeles, painting exhibition, Bradford narrated the music for the thirty-minute site-particular dancing duet foundation.
In 2015, as an element of the MATRIX 172 plan, Bradford made Pull Painting 1 at Atheneum; it was a sixty-foot-tall wall illustration. Bradford accomplished this by layering sheets, paints, and rope to create a riot of color. To get the textured composition of the wall, he sandpapered, scraped, stripped, and peeled away at it. In 2015, Bradford made Waterfall for his first New York exhibition. The Waterfall is made up of rolls of paper and cords removed from a large pull canvas. The painting was created by laying rope and billboard paper onto a canvas (Aloi 112). Bradford made lengthy fibrous strands of colored paper by stretching thread across the canvas, exposing the host’s archaeological remains.
More recently, in 2017, Bradford painted a mural titled ‘150 Portrait Tone’ for the museum of art in California. The wording of Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, calling 911 is depicted on the mural. The painting’s moniker, 150 Portrait Tone, is the title and tint system for the pinkish fiber utilized in it (Fitton 73). The term ‘portrait tone’ implies certain things about the subject being painted, much like the ‘flesh’ crayons in the Crayola box (retitled ‘peach’ in 1962). This title provides a sobering reflection on authority and representation in the framework of Bradford’s work of art.
Installations
Bradford completed a monumental sculpture titled ‘Bell Tower’ in 2014 for the Departure Lounge at LAX Airport. It was a massive, quadripartite piece covered in color printed paper, reminiscent of the broadside coated wooden gantries that have served as a constant source of creative inspiration for Bradford. Bradford’s Elgin Gardens, an installation for McGraw-Hill Building in New York’s Grand Central Station, was unveiled in 2015. Bradford’s gigantic cyclorama of paintings, Pickett’s Charge, was unveiled in late 2017 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in the District of Columbia. The creation of the massive artwork at the Gettysburg Museum depicting the Pickett–Pettigrew–Trimble Charge was inspired by the Battle of Gettysburg, the decisive attack during the 1863 conflict in the course of the War Between the States. Being one of Mark’s greatest location-specific arts up to now, the piece spans 400 feet of wall space.
In addition, ‘We the People’ by Mark Bradford was displayed in the United States Embassy in London in 2017. The enormous painting comprises 32 individual canvases that take up an entire wall of the embassy’s atrium and feature excerpts and full articles from the US Constitution (Nawi par. 10). A massive new sculpture by Bradford was unveiled in December 2018 as part of the Stuart Gallery in San Diego (Fitton 79). Entitled the tallest building on campus, ‘what hath God wrought’ was inspired by the pervasive impact of technology on human communication. Morse code is the foundation of the modern age of data exchange, where information flows at the speed of light (“Mark Bradford” 00:01:11-00:01:26). The sculpture is a reflection of both the university’s founding and the development of modern communication.
Variant Tasks
In 2009, Bradford was approached by the Getty Museum’s education department to work on his chosen project. He targeted educators rather than children, enlisting the help of ten artists (including Amy Sillman, Kara Walker, Catherine Opie, and Michael Joo) to create free lesson plans for instructors in grades K-12. Project Hermés, an artwork by Mark Bradford, was on display to the public for 24 hours only in August 2013 before the home it was installed in was demolished. Bradford began a long-term relationship with the Venice-based not-for-profit community partnership in connection with the 2017 United States Pavilion (Aloi 113).
The cooperative employs formerly incarcerated men and women to produce artisanal items and other products, facilitating their reintegration into society upon release. Rio dei Pensieri and Bradford undertook a long-term initiative called Process Collettivo to raise public understanding of the prison system and the benefits of the sociocultural collaborative model. The partnership has so far materialized in the form of a shop, which may be visited by the public during the duration of the La Biennale di Venezia and is located at San Polo 2599a.
Bradford’s assorted media on art piece was included in the program for Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank’s wedding ceremony in late 2018. The maids of honor and pageboys donned colorful sashes, also featuring the artwork (Long 48). It was revealed that Bradford had developed a one-of-a-kind image of an officer’s body camera in anticipation of the first version of the art exhibition in California in early 2019, titled ‘True to Scale.’ The proceeds from this series of limited-edition prints were donated to the artwork for justice drive, which provides resources to aid formerly incarcerated individuals in finding gainful employment as they reintegrate into society. More than a million dollars were raised because of Bradford’s initiative, which made him the first artist to donate directly to the fund through the proceeds from his artwork.
Bradford collaborated with Snap Company to develop an optical device for the Snapchat application in 2020, with the goal of increasing elector registration among people aged 18-24. In 2020, Bradford also produced a collection of three billboards for the contemporary art museum in Texas, which accompanied the exhibition’s attractive patterns and designs. Assistant director of learning at the Modern, Tiffany Wolf Smith, saw Modern Billings as a chance to bring the painting to communities beyond the museum’s gates. Bradford held a month-long artistic production education workshop with children from the regional Art School of Menorca to coincide with his exposition ‘Masses & Movements.’ The project focused on the worldwide refugee issue using maps of the earth and migrant routes (Fitton 77). His project with PILA Global, an academic, nonprofit organization serving refugees and low-income families, officially launched with this partnership.
Conclusion
Bradford is a multi-disciplinary artist whose collaged paintings, as well as his work in film, print, and installation, have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. His work, which he labels social abstraction, investigates the political and ecological conditions that continue to influence marginalized groups unfairly. Bradford has compiled a significant body of work that sheds light on global issues, the misrepresentation, and apprehension of LGBT distinctiveness, and the persistence of racial discrimination in the United States. Bradford’s exceptional vision and prolific imagination have earned him a place in history as one of the most influential artists of all time.
Themes of hope and destruction, belonging and separation, and peace and war run throughout Bradford’s body of work. Occasionally, Bradford incorporates ideas of sexuality and masculinity into his artwork as a reflection of his own perceptions as a gay man. Bradford’s charitable initiative resulted in more than a million dollars being donated to the artwork for justice campaign directly from the proceeds of his work, making him the first artist to do so.
Works Cited
Aloi, Giovanni. “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.” Esse, vol. 102, no. 1, 2021, pp. 110-114. Web.
Art21 [@art21] “Mark Bradford’s Décollage/Collage Approach.” Facebook,. 2022. Web.
Auping, Michael. Mark Bradford: End Papers. Prestel, 2020.
Fitton, Ben. “The Strange Monumentality of Some Artworks or Something.” Art & the Public Sphere, vol. 10, no. 1, 2021, pp. 71-85. Web.
Gillespie, Ben. “Pandemic Oral History Project.” Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 60, no. 1, 2021, pp. 90-95. Web.
Gogarty, Abse. “Feeling and Form in Mark Bradford’s American Pavilion.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 81, no. 4, 2018, pp. 519-537. Web.
Graham, Mark. “Deconstructing Narratives about Artistic Mastery in Art Education.” Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, vol. 38, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1-7. Web.
Griffin, Jonathan. “Mark Bradford Reveals New Paintings Quarantined in a Grain Tower.” The New York Times. 2020. Web.
Hankins, Carol, and Stéphane Aquin. Mark Bradford: Pickett’s Charge. Yale University Press, 2018.
Hill, Anita, et al. Mark Bradford. Phaidon Press, 2018.
Long, Lauren. “Art Fairs: Keep on Keeping on.” ArtAsiaPacific Almanac, vol. 16, no. 1, 2021, pp. 48-49. Web.
“Mark Bradford: What Hath God Wrought – Stuart Collection.” YouTube, uploaded by University of California Television (UCTV). 2022. Web.
Nawi, Diana. “Mark Bradford: Los Angeles.” The Long Museum. 2019. Web.
Rappolt, Mark. “This Is Not America.” ArtReview. 2019. Web.