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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Everything I do has an underlying political question.
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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'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 go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The freeways create economic and racial borders in Los Angeles. South of Interstate 10 is one group of people, west of the 10 another, and south of the 405 North yet another.
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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 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 know why so many artists talk about the mainstream's problems from the fringe. I think, unfortunately, it's almost like our education makes us too safe and terrified to step into the world.
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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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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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If Home Depot doesn't have it, Mark Bradford doesn't need it.
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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.