Top 49 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Bradford
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist Mark Bradford.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
If Home Depot doesn't have it, Mark Bradford doesn't need it.
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.
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.
I fell through the holes in the educational system. But education is still a way to change a life.
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.
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.
I can go to my own opening, and the security guard will tell me that I have to go to the security entrance.
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.
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.'
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?
I don't believe in blanket statements on race.
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.
My mom was a free spirit, and she brought me up to be a free spirit.
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.'
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.
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.
I don't look at things in black and white. There are big gray areas. There's a lot of slippage.
I have always been interested in people who live outside of the fabric of the norm.
I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I look at art as a container. You can't get inside it, so you have to ask all of these questions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.
I figure if you have one person that loves you, that's enough, growing up. You just need one person in your corner.
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.
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.
Everything I do has an underlying political question.
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.
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.
Often culture gets stuck in static, traditional narratives. Contemporary ideas give culture elasticity, flexibility, which is always a breath of fresh air. But these ideas shouldn't only be for people who can afford to go to a museum or a symposium in the "better part of town."
A Scorpio, it's just about peeling back the layers. And I'm always surprised at myself-there's a lot under there.
Tobacco and religious organisations.
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.
If power is abstraction, which many black men, black women, and people of color have very little voice in, well, then I want to sit at the table.
That's how I am and how I've always looked at the world. I understood what the pavilions were before I came to Venice, and I knew that wasn't going to be enough for me. I wanted to extend this conversation into something I call urgency. There is urgency with people in crisis. Some communities - often the black community - just live in this urgency.
The most important imperative to be questioned is the one that tells you to go the the art supply store to be a painter.
I always made stuff but never thought, I'm going to be an artist.
I never have a problem with being black. I have a problem with the easy association of what that means to some people.
I remind myself that we need to continue to do the things we believe in and be even more vocal about asking people to do more. This might be my Scorpio talking, but everything feels more intense than before. I'll probably keep doing what I'm doing and shift gears if something comes along. I'm pretty fluid.
When I was 18 years old, there was no internet and no gay teen nights. Instead, you went to the clubs and talked to grown men and did grown-up things.
For me, the '80s were like the drawing by Botticelli of the nine rings of hell.
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