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. Mark Bradford Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Mark Bradford Read Quote
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. Mark Bradford Read Quote
Generally, when I tell people I’m a painter, they ask me if I have a card: ‘Yes, we’d like this room in this color.’ I still might get cards that say ‘Mark Bradford. Painter.’ Mark Bradford Read Quote
I figure if you have one person that loves you, that’s enough, growing up. You just need one person in your corner. Mark Bradford Read Quote
I never expected to run into a room and suddenly I belonged. I figured people who live on the fringes of society, they’re more free. They can choose to visit anywhere; they don’t belong to anywhere. It’s like being without a nation, in a way. Mark Bradford Read Quote
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. Mark Bradford Read Quote
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. Mark Bradford Read Quote
I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do. Mark Bradford Read Quote
