Duck Walk

The multimedia artist Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, California, and was raised predominantly in the area known as South Central, where his mother worked as a hairdresser. Even after his family relocated to Santa Monica when he was 11, he continued to spend a great deal of time in the neighborhood, as it was where his mother’s business was located. Bradford’s proclivity for art manifested at a young age, and some of his earliest experiments with art – which in many ways foreshadowed his later, mature work – utilized materials he found around his mother’s place of work, hairdressing materials such as bobby pins, hair dye and perm endpapers. Despite this, it was not until Bradford was in his early 30s that he undertook formal study at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, where he eventually received his BFA in 1995 and his MFA in 1997.

Los Angeles, CA, USA