In the way that Noah Purifoy's assemblage-based art had its source in the Watts Rebellion of 1965, Mark Bradford's artistic practice can be understood to have had its roots in the backlash after the Rodney King beatings in 1992, which Bradford experienced as a young man working in his mother's beauty shop in South L.A.   For a gay, black youth, the police brutality and resulting race riots, which came at a time when he saw the AIDS epidemic running rampant around him, exerted an indelible formative influence.   Since 2001, when Bradford emerged as a fully mature artist, his art has addressed injustice to African Americans, gays and women in an extension of the "Identity Politics" of the art of the late '80s and early '90s, but which … [Read more...]