Mark Bradford b. 1961
Born in Los Angeles in 1961, contemporary artist Mark Bradford is perhaps best-known for his large-scale abstractions made from layered paper. Over the course of his career, he has expanded his practice to address social and racial inequality both in his methods and materials, as well as through social engagement, in what has come to be called “social abstraction.”
In his youth, Bradford worked in his mother’s Leimert Park beauty salon, obtaining his hairdresser’s license upon completing high school—materials gleaned from the shop would become an integral part of his work. Bradford did not pursue formal arts training until he was in his twenties, receiving his BFA from CalArts in 1995, followed by his MA from the same institution in 1997. Generally, Bradford’s work is characterized by a distinctive combination of collage, painting, and mixed-media techniques, and he is known for using found materials, often salvaged from the streets of Los Angeles. As Holland Cotter wrote, “Mr. Bradford’s art is of and about cities, the main one being Los Angeles.”
Bradford’s first solo exhibition was at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1998, and he became the subject of national attention when he participated in Free Style at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which identified itself as a “post-black” survey of new talent. In 2006, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and in 2009 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Bradford had his first solo museum exhibition in his hometown in 2015, with Scorched Earth at the Hammer Museum. That same year, he launched Art + Practice with his partner Allan DiCastro and philanthropist and collector Eileen Harris Norton, combining contemporary art with social services to support young people and foster youth in the community.
Throughout his career, Bradford has remained engaged with social issues, from teacher trainings devised with the support of the Getty Museum to fundraising for the Art for Justice Fund, which works to support formerly incarcerated people’s transition out of the prison system. Today, his works are in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
