Mark Bradford Lithographs
February 12–March 26, 2022
Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum presented Mark Bradford: Lithographs, featuring two lithographic prints produced by Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford with Cirrus Editions Ltd. This exhibition, displayed in the Museum’s new David Campagna Prints and Drawings Room, emphasizes Bradford's dedication to using abstraction to question the art canon and material hierarchy in contemporary art. Using innovative methods that incorporate elements of painting and collage in printmaking, the artist challenges technical conventions. His unorthodox art material of choice in the early 2000s—paper end wraps used in perms—were utilized in experimental ways for these lithographs. In choosing unorthodox paper-based goods in his practice, which he calls "social papers,” Bradford lays claim to an "aesthetic of southeast Los Angeles," and indirectly challenges the boundaries of urban landscape that historically have restricted the living and working conditions for people of color.
The February 12 opening of Mark Bradford: Lithographs coincided with the expanded Museum unveiling celebration and the launch of the CSULB Festival of the Arts, which spanned the entire spring semester. The exhibition was on view from February 12 to March 26, 2022.
Early in his professional career, Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford was best known for creating paintings by collaging layers of paper, specifically the translucent end wrap tissue papers used in beauty salons to protect hair from the chemicals in perming solutions, with scraps of pastel copier paper to add color. The delicate repetitions in these abstract works call to mind the subtle, gridded color compositions by expressionist painter Agnes Martin and the insistent realism and material austerity by minimalist painter Robert Ryman.
Bradford's motivations for his paintings in the early 2000s were entirely his own. Resistant to "easy" equations about identity based upon biography and historic narratives, he has worked to create a space for himself that is neither reductive nor didactic. Abstraction has provided him freedom, he feels, to dismantle normative archetypal narratives about modernism and Black culture. It gave him an opportunity to "speak out the side of his neck," a way of indirectly questioning how art and culture are framed.
When Mark Bradford was approached by Cirrus director Jean Milant to produce these prints in 2003, it was the first time the artist had worked at a professional print workshop. Since its earliest days, Cirrus had committed to exploring whatever means, however unconventional, to achieve the effects sought by artists. In Bradford's case, this meant accommodating his methods for composing paintings and applying them to printmaking. Bradford began by burning the edges of delicate end wraps used in hair salons, wetting them and then arranging them directly onto mylar sheets. The mylar was laid atop the photo emulsion of the lithographic plates. When the plates were exposed to ultraviolet light to create a positive image, those charred edges were transformed into dark outlines. For some plates, Bradford positioned torn pieces of copier paper onto the mylar to product clocks of flat color. For one of the featured prints, he stamped silhouettes of birds sitting on telephone wires to create linear patterns.
For the Cirrus editions, each plate was tinted with a distinct ink color. The resulting abstractions were revealed through the buildup of semi-opaque colors with each successive pass of the paper through the press. In this respect, the process was closer to that of painting than standard printmaking. The overall composition could not be entirely intuited by the artist or the printers until the final application of color was complete.
