Mark Bradford

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.