Artist Mark Bradford layers personal history into mixed-media artworks

DALLAS -- One of the most curious installations at the 2002 Art Basel in Miami was an artist doing hair.

The exceedingly tall and thin Mark Bradford, who had grown up in his mother's beauty salon, set up Foxyé Hair beauty shop, and he was doing what he knew best while aspiring to launch his art career.

He has come a long way. His artwork of the past decade is now on view at the Dallas Museum of Art, the fourth stop in a five-venue cross-country tour that opened in Columbus, Ohio, and moved on to Boston, then Chicago. It will conclude in San Francisco.

Remnants of the beauty business are still evident, but now they hang on the museum walls. The earliest works in the exhibit use layers of end papers, those flimsy rectangles of tissue used to wrap hair prior to permanent treatments. They were the first works that garnered national attention. By 2009, Bradford was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Award, the so-called genius grant.

Bradford had been toiling in his mother's beauty salon in South Central L.A. as a general gopher and intimidating door watcher when, at age 31, he enrolled in art classes. He was mature enough not to swallow the conventional art-school prejudice against art of the 1950s and '60s. The work of the midcentury abstractionists appealed to him, and he set himself on an abstractionist's course that owes a great deal to the influence of artists like Jackson Pollock.

Bradford began using what he knew, what was readily available and cheap -- the end papers.

Built layer upon layer, these works resemble film strips that have lost their traction and spin past in a blur. There was something about their common denominator and translucency that appealed. Smokey, from 2003, an homage to Smokey Robinson, is a geometric slurry of browns and grays that could be about skin, a darkened landscape, a fast life or the singer. These works with their suggestive layers launched Bradford, and paper became his métier.

"I do like paper," he said at the opening in Dallas. "It's a material so embedded in this world, and it's not 100 percent art history and it's not paint."

But the end-paper works couldn't last forever.

"I didn't want to be known as the hairdresser, end-paper guy," he said.

When he looked for his next chapter, he began using scavenged paper -- billboards, leaflets, magazines, posters, pasted in layers then sanded back so that vestiges of the many layers show through the enormous panels.

He often draws with a caulk gun, then overlays the ridged lines with layers of paper and sands them back with a belt sander. Or he uses string inside the layers and rips it out so that the surface of his pieces looks clawed. The rough edges of the tears are sanded, and in some places, they look freshly flayed; in others, it's as if they have healed over for a permanent scar.

The brutality of the process is at odds with the beautiful results.

Many of Bradford's pieces, such as A Truly Rich Man Is One Whose Children Run Into His Arms Even When His Hands Are Empty (2008), look like satellite photos, which Bradford considers "the abstracted images of new utopias." But in his aerial towns, the surface channels make the street grid, and instead of rooftops, the remnants of merchant posters show through, suggesting a profound narrative of the needs of the neighborhoods -- posters for paternity or HIV testing, for example.

Bradford says he tries to steer clear of ethical calls. He has straddled the polarities for so long -- living in upscale Santa Monica and downscale South Central L.A.; being an extremely tall African-American man whom strangers took for a potential NBA player, then when they found out he was a painter, asked him to paint their walls. He has been navigating between the currents of extremes for so long that it has become his greatest survival skill.

"I believe in the gray area, where there's a lot of slippage," he says.

He has not abandoned South Central. When he began making money, he bought the building that housed his mother's beauty parlor, and that is where he works. He is quite sensitive to the needs of distressed neighborhoods. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bradford went to New Orleans and raised money for the Lower Ninth Ward by donating a piece to auction, then stayed to help. At one point, he mentioned the need of an ark, and this turned into an artwork of half an ark, built of sheets of hurricane-ravaged plywood.

This huge "vessel of potentiality," Bradford says, was on display in New Orleans for 100 days; now it is in the barrel vault of the Dallas Museum of Art with a taxidermied crow flying overhead.

All the while he is talking, Bradford's hands are moving in front of his chest, smoothing an invisible surface. He's miming his work technique, layering on the paper and smoothing it, an act he finds soothing. At stressful times -- museum openings, for example -- his hands are constantly in motion as he talks about the work. It seems he is more comfortable making it than he is talking about it. So as he is pressed for answers, he is constantly smoothing, smoothing the rough edges into a malleable whole.

Gaile Robinson is the Star-Telegram art and design critic, 817-390-7113