Mark Bradford was born and raised in Los Angeles, where he still lives and works. He earned a BFA in 1995 and an MFA in 1997 from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. Bradford continues the lineage of grand postwar abstraction, and at the same time, opens up new possibilities for contemporary painting with his experimental use of paper, often taken from the social fabric of his environment. The first museum survey of his work was organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2010; in 2017 he represented the United States at the 57th Venice Biennial, with the exhibition Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day, which was co-sponsored by The Baltimore Museum of Art.
“‘Abstraction,’ to me, means that you’re interrogating—it’s interrogating. It’s dismantling. It’s moving things around a little bit. It’s little-bitty racing. I love when race and abstraction get put in the same sentence, because we are always supposed to be recognizable and real. . . . concrete, . . . There is no playing around. . . .I just believed that I had a space of imagination, and I allowed myself to move things around.”