Mark Bradford: You Don't Have to Tell Me Twice

For his first New York solo exhibition since 2015, Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford interlaces urgent themes of migration, isolation, and vulnerability with an uncompromising tenacity that breathes through monumental scale and unruly material. Impressive paintings made of paper, a pioneering sculpture, and an absorbing video debut decidedly figurative innovations in Bradford’s singular practice of “social abstraction,” encompassing three floors of Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street location, the entire building dedicated to a single artist—a rare occurrence from this major gallery. Beyond the scope of a visual language, this awe-inspiring exhibition demonstrates Bradford’s readiness to develop his own allegorical universe, informed by personal and cultural mythologies and populated by a cast of characters that echo familiar dynamics of a predatory nature.

Squeezed between the floor and ceiling, a three-tiered “merchant poster” made of found billboard paper towers over the first gallery, an enormous commitment considering a cultural pivot toward digital advertising leaves one of Bradford’s signature materials increasingly difficult to source. Reprising his nearly two-decade investigation of vulturous advertisements that target low-income neighborhoods, Bradford’s work, titled Manifest Destiny (2023), draws a throughline between modern socioeconomic exploitation and settler-colonial history. Referencing the nineteenth-century belief that the United States was divinely obliged to expand westward—precipitating the brutal displacement of countless Indigenous people—the work introduces a transhistorical framework ripe for considering the exhibition.

The words “Johnny Buys Houses” mimic one such advertisement that, in a rare occurrence, identifies its solicitor by name. This marks an important development in one of Bradford’s most essential series: no longer an anonymous merchant, Johnny joins the ranks of Cerberus—the Greek mythological monster subject to a major 2019 painting—occasioning a specter that haunts the exhibition, embodied in the nearby Johnny the Jaguar (2023). Rendered in paper that the artist soaks, layers, and tears to achieve the fluidity of paint, layers of material and vibrant colors emulate expressive impasto to form a jaguar snarling eye-to-eye with its viewer.

This apex predator relates to Bradford’s ongoing investigation of the Great Migration, or the twentieth-century mass exodus of Black Americans escaping racial terror in the Jim Crow South. Prompted by a 1913 advertisement in the NAACP publication The Crisis, Johnny the Jaguar is one of several large tapestry paintings depicting plot maps, street names, and the flora and fauna of Blackdom—a historic, all-Black homesteader settlement in New Mexico.¹ Incorporated in 1903 but abandoned by the late 1920s, Blackdom activates a ghostly aura that weaves these contradictions of time and place: though Johnny fosters malevolence, evidence suggests the spotted feline is revered in the oral histories and visual cultures indigenous to the Chihuahuan Desert. Bradford’s lush, enigmatic landscapes embrace these ambiguities, conjuring the prospect of opportunity as much as the threat of precarity in dire times.

Among the largest tapestries on view, Jungle Jungle and Fire Fire (both 2021) depict plants and animals in their striking engagement with historic European displays of power—namely the prized “Unicorn Tapestries” (1495–1505) at the Met Cloisters—to highlight medieval social tensions and economic disparities that plague our present day. Blending the here and there, titles like Where Lee Goodwin was Jailed & Lynched (2023) are pulled from a map of William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, indicative of Bradford’s world-building ambitions.

The collapse of time and place is most pronounced between Death Drop (1973), a 20-second looped video, and Death Drop (2023), Bradford’s first sculpture of a human figure in nearly two decades. Swelling the intersection of persecution and play, these works instance moments of joy even as they broach the macabre. The former depicts a twelve-year-old Bradford falling to the ground as if victim to an epic shootout, signaling his adolescent identification—or disidentification, as the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz might have put it—with Blaxploitation film stars. For the latter, Bradford covered a larger-than-life 3D foam model of his own body with paper and sanded it down. Positioned in a “death drop” (a dip), a dramatic pose deriving from Ball culture, the lone figure wears a puffer jacket, locating him outdoors and away from community protection. Subject to the threat of Johnny, his twisted body recalls the young Bradford as much as those subject to persecution, whether by crucifixion or gunfire.

Muted in tone and set over a railroad timetable detailing a North-South travel schedule, the titular painting You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice (2023) contrasts the colorful tapestries and prompts an active, introspective motion. It implies a speaker willing to step into new territory to meet their needs and desires, and that’s just what Bradford has done here. While previous works depict aerial views of map-like compositions, these rotate the axis by 90 degrees, inaugurating a universe into which a viewer may enter—one filled with personalities both foreign and familiar. Having maneuvered several defining moments of the last decade—from presenting the American Pavilion in archeological ruin at the 2017 Venice Biennale to widespread social unrest, sweeping political turbulence, and a global pandemic—Mark Bradford returns to New York like we’ve rarely seen him before.

1. Bradford immortalizes this advertisement in a monumental work for the group exhibition A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum and co-organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, through June 25. Readers traveling to Guadalajara, Mexico, before August 6 may also be interested in Mark Bradford: The Underdogs, curated by Viviana Kuri Haddad, at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan.