Mark Bradford: Merchant PostersThis book gathers for the first time an extensive selection of American artist--or "builder and demolisher," as he describes himself--Mark Bradford's gorgeous, searing and heavily textured "merchant posters." The original printed posters, collected by Bradford from around his Central Los Angeles neighborhood, are brightly colored local advertisements that target the area's vulnerable lower-income residents. For Bradford, they serve as both the formal and conceptual underpinnings of his works on paper, décollages/collages that engage with the pressures of the cityscape. "The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive," he notes; "If there's a 20-foot wall with one advertisement for a movie about war, then you have the repetition of the same image over and over--war, violence, explosions, things being blown apart. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed." Eagerly anticipated, this is the first large-scale publication by a major publisher about the work of this important and increasingly influential artist. Artist and writer Malik Gaines considers Bradford's play with signs in relation to literary and performative theories of African-American forms; writer and cultural critic Ernest Hardy addresses social issues, in Los Angeles and more broadly, raised by Bradford's source material; Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson examines the language in the work as it relates to Concrete poetry; and Dia Art Foundation Director Philippe Vergne looks at the surface of the work and Bradford's processes of mining and excavation. |
Contents
Border Crossings | 7 |
No More Fire The Paper Next Time | 19 |
The Artist Formerly Known as Mark Bradford | 25 |
Catalogue of the Works | 151 |
Common terms and phrases
14 inches 2007 Mixed media 22 inches Following 56½ inches advertising Affichistes African American American Art artist Aspen Art Museum Betye Saar billboard Bob Gersh Central Los Angeles CHILD CUSTODY DIVORCE collage 14 collage 15½ collage 22 x collage 37 color Concrete Poetry Contemporary Art Corner of Desire culture Curator DELIVERED TO DELIVERED Desire and Piety Director ELIVER ERASE erasure exhibition FEMA TRAILER Gallery Glenn Fuhrman Gun Show Hammer Museum Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson inches Courtesy inches Following pages inches Opposite inches Private collection John Runyon language layers Linda and Bob Mark Bradford Mark's media collage 28 memory merchant posters Mixed media collage Museum of American Museum of Art neighborhood painting paper Philippe Vergne Plate PROPAN DELIVERED PROPANE PROPANE reclaimed representation Ridin signs Sober Living Home South Central South Los Angeles street surface tion Untitled Corner Visitor Services Assistant visual Whitney Museum x 22 inches York