Mark Bradford

Bradford’s ‘Johnny the Jaguar’ and ‘Two-Faced’ assemble plant and animal species indigenous to the Chihuahuan desert of the American Southwest into rich, tapestry-like paintings particular to American history. Drawn to the story of Blackdom—an early 20th century African American homesteader settlement established near the Chihuahuan desert—Bradford constructs a dreamlike landscape that imagines a world of predators and prey that populate the migratory landscape of internally displaced Americans. The central antagonist is a roving beast that stands in for several kinds of historical predation and the tendency for systems of exploitation to camouflage and adapt to any moment of social crisis.

‘Where Lee Goodwin was Jailed & Lynched’ and ‘Haint Blue’ are based on a plot map of Blackdom. Layers of papers and caulk processed using Bradford’s signature techniques of abrasion and oxidation alchemize the gridded structure of the Blackdom homesteader colony’s city plan into rich golds and blacks and, alternately, soft, muted earth tones. Side by side, these two works juxtapose the ‘gold rush’ feel of the hopefulness of some African Americans who left the South during the Great Migration with the measured realty of the challenges they would eventually confront in their new communities, whether self-built Black-only homesteader colonies or more integrational communities like the Greenwood District of Tulsa that was massacred by angry white neighbors in 1921.

Four monumental canvases on the fifth floor—including the show’s titular ‘You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice’ (2023)—continue Bradford’s ongoing exploration of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South. Based on a chart showing travel distances between railroad centers in the United States from the 1920s, these paintings feature gridded numbers and city names created with oxidized paper and caulk, forming a veritable parallel landscape of the continental United States. The vibrant palette of Bradford’s tapestry paintings gives way to more muted tones of stained canvas and paper oxidized to soft grays, tans, and whites in a sober evocation of the urgency in uprooting oneself in the face of catastrophe.

Bradford’s wide-reaching new body of work continues his career-long exploration of systems and institutions that exploit vulnerable populations, while shifting perspective from the aerial bird’s-eye view of the cityscape familiar in his work since the early 2000s, to an interpersonal perspective that puts the audience eye-to-eye with his allegorical world of survival, violence, and desire. With this shift in orientation, the audience becomes implicated in the chase and forces a reckoning with our individual roles in perpetrating and perpetuating violence and oppression on our vulnerable neighbors.