This major traveling exhibition, the artist’s first museum survey, introduces Bay Area viewers to a remarkable contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. A 2009 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award recipient, Bradford (b. 1961) is best known for dazzling, large-scale abstract paintings made from a variety of collaged materials, including billboard paper, permanent-wave end papers, newsprint, carbon paper, and other scavenged materials that he layers together, or strips apart, and then manipulates with nylon string, caulking, and sanding. With this method he reinvests abstract painting with political, social, and economic meaning (often defined by race, gender, and class) that resonates with the character and structure of urban America and, most specifically, the in Leimert Park, the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where the artist lived as a child and continues to maintain his studio. Organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts and co-presented in San Francisco by SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, this comprehensive account of Bradford’s career to date will be on view at both venues, offering more than 50 works spanning 2000 to 2010.