West Coast artist Mark Bradford’s refined mixed-media collages are made of the stuff found lying around South LA hair salons.
Bradford’s former job at his family’s beauty shop inspired him to tease out the artistic potential of perm-papers, dyes, and foils, setting him on a path to CalArts, a MacArthur Fellowship, Prospect New Orleans, and now a major museum survey. His powerful, dynamic work merges personal history, political awareness, and the innovative use of alternative and found materials into classic, yet emotionally raw, abstract art that’s completely of the moment.
View Bradford’s Wexner Center exhibition, keep up with him on the museum blog, purchase a copy of the show catalog
, watch a PBS video interview with the artist, and look for the show to travel to Boston, Dallas, Chicago, and San Francisco in 2011.
Click through below to view a gallery of Bradford’s work.
Bradford’s Noah’s Ark at Prospect New Orleans in 2009