Mark Bradford (American, born 1961)
Untitled, 2003

Run Time: 2:10
Recorded by Jared Ledesma, Associate Curator May 10, 2021

Hi there I'm Jared Ledesma Associate Curator at the Des Moines Art Center and today I am talking about Mark Bradford. Bradford grew up working in Los Angeles so where he still lives. He worked in his mother's beauty shop off and on pretty much throughout Graduate School. And he talks about the beauty shop as being kind of a source of inspiration or this this source of creativity and how it was this epicenter of storytelling and narrative and there are these cross narrative happening at the same time. And so you know he's just out of Graduate School, he's not making a lot of money and he looks to end papers as a source and material to create paintings. End papers are this light tissue paper, about an inch wide by two inches long that are used to help create a permanent wave in hair styling. Bradford recalls that this material at the time was really cheap it was about $0.50 for a pack of 1000 end papers. And what's great about them is when you apply liquid to them they attach to a surface really easily, so it was easy for Bradford to collage them on to surfaces like canvas. The pictures he created from using multiple end papers, they look like the print in the Art Center’s collection, they kind of create this grid-like design and they recall abstract paintings made in the 1960s and 1970s when artists were thinking more about simplicity and stripping art from storytelling or narrative and breaking it down to line and shape and color. But with Bradford, in this work, there is a story in these images because of his use of end papers. There's this discrete reference to the history of the beauty shop, to the black beauty shop and to the history of him working in the beauty shop and the end papers imbue the work with the history of this material that's intrinsic to black culture.