Quotes from Mark Bradford

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.

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.

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.'

Everything I do has an underlying political question.

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.

If power is abstraction, which many black men, black women, and people of color have very little voice in, well, then I want to sit at the table.

I don't believe in blanket statements on race.

I have always been interested in people who live outside of the fabric of the norm.

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 don't know why we, in the art world, cannot unpack things and sort of make hybrid notions of a practice. We're very rigid. It's funny, though; in music, we have no problem sampling, mixing and remixing. But in the art world, why can't we take little parts of history and mix it together?

In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.

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.

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

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.

The most important imperative to be questioned is the one that tells you to go the the art supply store to be a painter.

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.

The most important imperative to be questioned is the one that tells you to go the the art supply store to be a painter.