Zitat des Tages von Mark Bradford:
If Home Depot doesn't have it, Mark Bradford doesn't need it.
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.
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.
My mom was a free spirit, and she brought me up to be a free spirit.
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.
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.
The police pull up in back of my car and run my plates - they don't see you as you are; they see you through a racialized negative gaze. I think the best thing is not to internalize it too much, or it'll make you crazy because you know it's going to happen again.
I can go to my own opening, and the security guard will tell me that I have to go to the security entrance.
I don't believe in blanket statements on race.
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.
I have always been interested in people who live outside of the fabric of the norm.
I look at art as a container. You can't get inside it, so you have to ask all of these questions.
In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.
I don't know why so many artists talk about the mainstream's problems from the fringe. I think, unfortunately, it's almost like our education makes us too safe and terrified to step into the world.
The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'
When you're as tall as I am, you have no public privacy. People are constantly coming up and talking to you. Constantly. You have one of two ways to go: you engage with people, or you become really bitter. I choose to engage.
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.
