Mark Bradford (b. 1961) is best known for large-scale abstract paintings made from a variety of collaged materials, including billboard paper, hairdressing supplies – of his previous trade as a hairdresser in his mother’s salon – newsprint, carbon paper, and other papers layered together (or stripped apart) and then manipulated with nylon string, caulking, and sanding. Often incorporating references to the social conditions of a particular location, these works not only extend the possibilities of contemporary painting, they offer an unusual and highly individual examination of the economies (often defined by race, gender, and class) that structure urban society in the United States, and specifically in Leimert Park, the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where the artist lived as a child and continues to maintain his studio.
Mark Bradford was born in Los Angeles in 1961, where he continues to live and work. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts. Bradford is the recipient of several prestigious grants and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2002); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003); the Bucksbaum Award, Whitney Museum of American Art (2006); The United States Artists Fellowship (2006); and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant (2009). He has been included in major exhibitions at the Cincinatti Art Museum (2008); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2006); REDCAT, Lost Angeles (2004); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003); and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2001). He has also participated in Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008), the 55th Carnegie International (2008), the XXVII Sao Paulo Biennial (2006); the Whitney Biennial (2006); and inSite: Art Practices in the Public Domain, San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico (2005).
