MARK BRADFORD. YOU`RE NOBODY (TIL SOMEBODY KILLS YOU)

MARK BRADFORD (1961-)

Mark Bradford is best known for dazzling large-scale abstract collages that incisively examine class, race, and the gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States. A recipient of a 2009 MacArthur Foundation Award (nicknamed the \'genius grants\'), Bradford gathers found and salvaged materials from the area surrounding his studio in Leimert Park, L.A., engaging in an intricate artistic process that involves both creation and destruction. His complex, fractured works address pressing political issues and the media\'s influence on contemporary society while cataloguing cultural change and the artist\'s personal responses to societal conditions. The first major book on this leading African American artist, \"Mark Bradford: You\'re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)\" features essays by distinguished authors who investigate how Bradford deftly straddles the line between social critique and formal innovation, playing the two against one another to produce works of seduction and analysis. Topics include Bradford\'s debt to abstract expressionism, his relationship to the largely unknown history of twentieth-century abstraction by African American artists, his work as a public artist, and his interest in midcentury European collage and decollage practices.

Forfattere: Christopher Bedford is curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Hilton Als is theatre critic for The New Yorker. Carol Eliel is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eungie Joo is the Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs at the New Museum, New York. Richard Shiff is professor and Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas. Katy Siegel is professor of art history at Hunter College, City University of New York. Robert Storr is dean of the Yale University School of Art.