My Global Hustle
The Many Layers of Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford is the tallest artist I know—six feet seven and a half inches, and pencil thin, which makes him look taller. His paintings, as you’d expect, run large. When I visited Bradford’s industrial-sized studio, in South Los Angeles, this spring, one wall was almost entirely covered by a huge outline map of the United States, with clusters of numbers that represented the AIDS cases reported in each state up to 2009. The map was a study for a much larger one that he planned for a wall at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, where an exhibition of his new work opens on June 20th.
