Mark Bradford Quotes
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The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed.
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I have always been very intrigued by the outside of buildings. I can just walk down the street and be content with watching facades. I don't have to go inside.
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I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do.
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When you're as tall as I am, you have no public privacy. People are constantly coming up and talking to you. Constantly. You have one of two ways to go: you engage with people, or you become really bitter. I choose to engage.
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In the neighborhood where my studio is, in South Central Los Angeles, there are a lot of immigrant-owned businesses. I'm constantly amazed at the level of work they do. It's above anything. For me, I think I pattern myself on that work ethic.
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I fell through the holes in the educational system. But education is still a way to change a life.
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Everything I do has an underlying political question.
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At the end of the day, I'm an artist. I may make work and decide to do something political, but it will come out of an artist's position. It won't come out of society telling me I have to. If I do, it's because I choose, as an artist, to do it.
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In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.
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That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.
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The police pull up in back of my car and run my plates - they don't see you as you are; they see you through a racialized negative gaze. I think the best thing is not to internalize it too much, or it'll make you crazy because you know it's going to happen again.
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I don't look at things in black and white. There are big gray areas. There's a lot of slippage.
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I'm kind of an insecure artist. I hop from piece to piece. I always think my life depends on every painting. Every painting is my first painting.
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I never expected to run into a room and suddenly I belonged. I figured people who live on the fringes of society, they're more free. They can choose to visit anywhere; they don't belong to anywhere. It's like being without a nation, in a way.
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The funny thing about being creative is that, especially high school people, I kept noticing I'd always go to these certain materials. I'd always be picking up trash and picking up paper and using it.
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I don't know why we, in the art world, cannot unpack things and sort of make hybrid notions of a practice. We're very rigid. It's funny, though; in music, we have no problem sampling, mixing and remixing. But in the art world, why can't we take little parts of history and mix it together?
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If Home Depot doesn't have it, Mark Bradford doesn't need it.
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I don't believe in blanket statements on race.
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I just like artist-driven projects, but for artists themselves: artist spaces, artist mentor programs, and artists buying buildings and making lofts. Doing whatever we can do. Because at the end of the day, I really think that we as a community only have each other.
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The most important imperative to be questioned is the one that tells you to go the the art supply store to be a painter.
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I am fully present wherever I am. Why bother being in a community or neighborhood and not being fully present? I think that's colonization. I'm not interested in that.
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Life, work - it's all very organic and fluid, a laboratory. I always tell people: whatever your thing is, you just have to be in it. Jump in; you'll figure it out.
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About the time I was 7, I got really into black-exploitation films, so I made my own Wonder Woman, but I made her black.
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My mom was a free spirit, and she brought me up to be a free spirit.