Tomorrow Is Another Day

Mark Bradford’s exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2017 is born out of his longtime commitment to the inherently social nature of the material world we all inhabit. For Bradford, abstraction is not opposed to content; it embodies it. His selection of ordinary materials represents the hair salon, Home Depot, and the streets of Los Angeles—both the culture industry and the grey economy. Bradford renews the traditions of abstract and materialist painting, demonstrating that freedom from socially prescribed representation is profoundly meaningful in the hands of a black artist. Bradford’s longtime social and intellectual interests will be present in the Pavilion, most notably in his concern for marginalized people, both their vulnerability and their resiliency, and the cyclical threat and hope of American unfulfilled social promise. Coming at a moment of terrible uncertainty, Tomorrow is Another Day is a narrative of ruin, violence, agency, and possibility, a story of ambition and belief in art’s capacity to engage us all in urgent and profound conversations, and even action. Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, where he lives and works. He received a BFA (1995) and MFA (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Best known for his large-scale abstract paintings that examine the class-, race-, and gender-based economies that structure urban society in the United States, Bradford’s richly layered and collaged canvases represent a connection to the social world through materials. Bradford uses fragments of found posters, billboards, newsprint, and custom-printed paper to simultaneously engage with and advance the formal traditions of abstract painting. Solo exhibitions include Scorched Earth at the Hammer Museum (2015), Sea Monsters at the Rose Art Museum (2014), Aspen Art Museum (2011), Maps and Manifests at Cincinnati Art Museum (2008), and Neither New Nor Correct at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007). In 2009, Mark Bradford was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Award. In 2010, Mark Bradford, a large-scale survey of his work, was organized by Christopher Bedford and presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, before traveling to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Beginning November 2017, the artist will present Pickett’s Charge, a monumental commissioned cyclorama of paintings at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. His work has been widely exhibited and has been included in group shows at LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014), Whitney Museum of American Art (2013), the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011), Seoul Biennial (2010), the Carnegie International (2008), São Paulo Biennial (2006), and Whitney Biennial (2006). Mark Bradford is represented worldwide by Hauser & Wirth. Christopher Bedford U.S. Pavilion Commissioner and Co-Curator Christopher Bedford is the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and the 10th director to lead the museum, which is renowned for its outstanding collections of 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art. Recognized as an innovative and dynamic leader, Bedford served as director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University for four years prior to joining the BMA. His previous experience includes curatorial positions at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and J. Paul Getty Museum. Born in Scotland and raised in the United States and the UK, Bedford has a B.A. from Oberlin College, an M.A. from Case Western Reserve University, and has studied in the doctoral programs at the University of Southern California and the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London. He is currently a trustee of Art + Practice, Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, and Maryland Citizens for the Arts. Katy Siegel U.S. Pavilion Co-Curator Katy Siegel is the Senior Curator for Research and Programming at The Baltimore Museum of Art and inaugural Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art at Stony Brook University. Among her curated exhibitions are Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965, with Okwui Enwezor and Ulrich Wilmes at the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Light Years: Jack Whitten, 1971-1974, Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975, co-curated with Christopher Wool, and many other shows at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, where she was Curator at Large; and High Times Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-75, which toured internationally. Her books include “The heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler; Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art; and Abstract Expressionism. Siegel is also a contributing editor at Artforum. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College, and her M.A. and her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.

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