Mark Bradford Quotes
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Tobacco and religious organisations.
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My mom was a free spirit, and she brought me up to be a free spirit.
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In North America, what happens often is that they put race before nationhood. Everyone here is Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American. But really, we're just North Americans of all these different descents. The only time I notice North Americans becoming national is when a war happens or a crisis happens.
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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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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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I figure if you have one person that loves you, that's enough, growing up. You just need one person in your corner.
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I've always been inspired by small details that make me wander. My mother would ask me, 'What are you looking at so intensely?' I would answer, 'Everything and nothing.' She really supported my wanderings, called me Marco Polo.
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I look at art as a container. You can't get inside it, so you have to ask all of these questions.
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I have always been interested in people who live outside of the fabric of the norm.
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The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'
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My mom was an orphan, and there was never anybody to tell her what she could or couldn't do. At the core, she's probably an artist - an artist and a feminist.
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Generally, when I tell people I'm a painter, they ask me if I have a card: 'Yes, we'd like this room in this color.' I still might get cards that say 'Mark Bradford. Painter.'
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I just follow the things I'm interested in. That's always guided me. If I'm interested in something, that's where I go.
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My art practice is very detail-, labor- intensive and I think that that's a way of slowing myself down so that I can hear myself think. That quieter voice has sometimes the more interesting idea, if I can get to it.
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I always made stuff but never thought, I'm going to be an artist.
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When I was thirteen, I was in a supermarket with my mother, and for no reason at all, I picked up a science-fiction book at the checkout stand and started reading it. I couldn't believe I was doing that, actually reading a book. And, man, it opened up a whole new thing. Reading became the sparkplug of my imagination.
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You either have to find a way to be really creative materially, or you better have a trust fund. And, last I checked, I didn't have a trust fund.
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I can go to my own opening, and the security guard will tell me that I have to go to the security entrance.