Archive Project 16: Mark Bradford

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The Project Series
Project 16: Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford’s exhibition was the sixteenth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Mark’s work includes his signature textile paintings, “ghetto-fabulous” photographic portraits, and fabricated sculptures. He brings together his experiences as an artist, a “beauty operator,” and a cultural historian. Bradford links the art-historical traditions of Minimal Abstraction with a pop-culture look at black aesthetics.

For this exhibition, Bradford presented a new large-scale painting that incorporated material associated with the beauty industry—hair end-papers for permanents provide both the texture and the formal structure, while cellophane hair-color gives the canvases their incandescent hues.

In the past, Bradford ’s paintings combined end-papers with a monochromatic tone that, in discussions of his work, many have situated in the abstract tradition of the Minimalist painters Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, or Brice Marden. His newer work uses color much more forcefully, and he now includes collaged material such as text from flyers found in his neighborhood, torn strips of posters, and ink stamps.

Mark lives and works in Los Angeles, attended Cal Arts, and has had numerous exhibitions in the last few years. He was included in the seminal “Freestyle” show at the Studio Museum in New York in 2001. As Mark will tell you, there has been much discussion of his work in reviews in most every national art journal.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator