Mark Bradford: Tomorrow is Another Day - 2017 Venice Biennale

I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do. 
Mark Bradford

Barren, 2017

Exterior installation of American Pavilion 

gravel, trash, paper cups, broken hoses

American Pavilion
MARK  BRADFORD
TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY
Venice Biennale 
2017

Ever since I'd seen an old PBS Art 21, about artist Ann Hamilton, I'd wanted to go to the Venice Biennale. She was the artist who did the 1999 American Pavilion and my parents had seen her installation that year. The artist chosen for the 2017 American Pavilion was artist Mark Bradford. 

Check out how cool his work and medium are in this video.

It was incredible. 

Mark Bradford was born November, 1961 in Los Angeles, California. I'd seen his work at the Broad Museum downtown and was very excited to see his pavilion that year!

Here he his talking about the installation and his philanthropic work in Venice.

Art is everywhere, in Venice, during the Biennale. It all began in 1895 and it was founded by the Venetian City Council. It is held in odd-numbered years.

The formal exhibiting happens at the the Giardini. It is a huge park or garden where there is an enormous exhibition hall and 30 smaller national pavilions. The 30 permanent national pavilions are owned by the participating country and managed by their ministries of culture and if you didn't end up in one of those, your country might be exhibiting at another venue somewhere around Venice. 

As I said, art is everywhere!

Spoiled Foot, 2016

The entrance room of the American Pavilion of 2017 was filled with this enormous installation piece that pushed you to the outer edges of the room to get by it. It had Mark Bradford's trademark layering and textures. It would be difficult to describe it so I'm glad I photographed it. It was a metaphor for people being "pushed to the margins" (you physically were pushed) and for "centralized social power." 

I'm kind of an insecure artist.
I hop from piece to piece. 
I always think my life depends on every painting. 
Every painting is my first painting. 
~Mark Bradford

Medusa, 2016

Acrylic, paint paper, rope, caulk ... 

Medusa, as told by Ovid, was a beautiful and powerful woman raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple. Athena was pissed and transformed her lovely locks into serpents and gave her a face that would turn men to stone looking upon her.

This piece made me sad for Medusa.

I looked her dead in the eye
And I knew her
~Mark Bradford's poem of Medusa 

Pavilion Rotunda

Oracle, 2017

Site-specific

skeins of sleached and black paper

About this piece he said it was "a site between cave and altar, between nature and culture, where oracles would deliver profound truth and predictions."

I just follow the things I'm interested in. 
That's always guided me. 
If I'm interested in something, that's where I go. 
Mark Bradford

I wish you could see the following two works in person. They represented the "beauty and fragility of nature" and they were stunning. 

The layers of color and texture were absolutely transporting. There was so much depth. I think that's why I love Rothko, as well. You feel like you can fall into the layers and let them take you on a journey somewhere else. I'm not great with talking about art in a way a historian or gallery person would talk about it, but I know what I love when I see it. And this ... I loved!

Go Tell it on the Mountain, 2016

My art practice is very detail-, labor- intensive 

and I think that that's a way of slowing myself down 

so that I can hear myself think. 

That quieter voice has sometimes 

the more interesting idea, 

if I can get to it.

~Mark Bradford

Tomorrow Is Another Day

mixed media on canvas

Below is a detail of the piece above. If I'd had a chair and endless amounts of time I could have stared at it for hours. The commercial paper used was bleached, soaked and then molded by the artist.

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. 
~Mark Bradford

From Artnet.news

"...In Venice, as an adjunct to his pavilion, he has pledged to provide funding over six years for Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a local prison cooperative that teaches practical job skills to inmates. Consider it site-specific social work. For him, art is “not just what happens in the hermetically sealed studio, and it’s not what happens in the communities—it’s something in between.”

"When I say the artist is a citizen, I have interest in politics and communities, but it’s still under the umbrella of being an artist,” Bradford said at the opening ceremony for his pavilion. Over the years, he has used his clout as a market star to support numerous social causes in his hometown of Los Angeles, focusing this work through his nonprofit organization Art + Practice. He has sold artworks at auction to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund these projects." 

Here's a 60 Minutes interview about the chance meeting between Bradford and Anderson Cooper. 

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. 
~Mark Bradford

The Biennale was so inspiring and completely varied. Each pavilion was another creative adventure to behold! I'll share more of the artists but I plan to alternate with other posts, as well. Venice, Padua, Verona, Hawaii and then ... my recent walk through Italy on the Via di Francesco. 

Blessings and light!