Mark Bradford

“I don't believe in blanket statements on race.”

“That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.”

“I fell through the holes in the educational system. But education is still a way to change a life.”

“In the neighborhood where my studio is, in South Central Los Angeles, there are a lot of immigrant-owned businesses. I'm constantly amazed at the level of work they do. It's above anything. For me, I think I pattern myself on that work ethic.”

“Life, work - it's all very organic and fluid, a laboratory. I always tell people: whatever your thing is, you just have to be in it. Jump in; you'll figure it out.”

“If Home Depot doesn't have it, Mark Bradford doesn't need it.”

“About the time I was 7, I got really into black-exploitation films, so I made my own Wonder Woman, but I made her black.”

“My mom was an orphan, and there was never anybody to tell her what she could or couldn't do. At the core, she's probably an artist - an artist and a feminist.”

“I've always been inspired by small details that make me wander. My mother would ask me, 'What are you looking at so intensely?' I would answer, 'Everything and nothing.' She really supported my wanderings, called me Marco Polo.”

“I look at art as a container. You can't get inside it, so you have to ask all of these questions.”

“The freeways create economic and racial borders in Los Angeles. South of Interstate 10 is one group of people, west of the 10 another, and south of the 405 North yet another.”

“I can go to my own opening, and the security guard will tell me that I have to go to the security entrance.”

“In North America, what happens often is that they put race before nationhood. Everyone here is Hispanic-American, Chinese-American, African-American. But really, we're just North Americans of all these different descents. The only time I notice North Americans becoming national is when a war happens or a crisis happens.”

“You either have to find a way to be really creative materially, or you better have a trust fund. And, last I checked, I didn't have a trust fund.”

“At the end of the day, I'm an artist. I may make work and decide to do something political, but it will come out of an artist's position. It won't come out of society telling me I have to. If I do, it's because I choose, as an artist, to do it.”

“I am fully present wherever I am. Why bother being in a community or neighborhood and not being fully present? I think that's colonization. I'm not interested in that.”

“I just like artist-driven projects, but for artists themselves: artist spaces, artist mentor programs, and artists buying buildings and making lofts. Doing whatever we can do. Because at the end of the day, I really think that we as a community only have each other.”

“Everything I do has an underlying political question.”

“I have always been very intrigued by the outside of buildings. I can just walk down the street and be content with watching facades. I don't have to go inside.”

“The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed.”