Mark Bradford quotes:

I fell through the holes in the educational system. But education is still a way to change a life.

When I was thirteen, I was in a supermarket with my mother, and for no reason at all, I picked up a science-fiction book at the checkout stand and started reading it. I couldn't believe I was doing that, actually reading a book. And, man, it opened up a whole new thing. Reading became the sparkplug of my imagination.

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.

If Home Depot doesn't have it, Mark Bradford doesn't need it.

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.

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.

The funny thing about being creative is that, especially high school people, I kept noticing I'd always go to these certain materials. I'd always be picking up trash and picking up paper and using it.

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 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.

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?

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.'

I figure if you have one person that loves you, that's enough, growing up. You just need one person in your corner.

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.

That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.

My art practice is very detail-, labor- intensive and I think that that's a way of slowing myself down so that I can hear myself think. That quieter voice has sometimes the more interesting idea, if I can get to it.

Tobacco and religious organisations.

I always made stuff but never thought, I'm going to be an artist.

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.

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

I look at art as a container. You can't get inside it, so you have to ask all of these questions.

My mom was a free spirit, and she brought me up to be a free spirit.

I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do.

Everything I do has an underlying political question.

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