Mark Bradford

Bread and Circuses
2007

Large, intricate mixed-media artwork on gallery wall with abstract, chaotic details and silver backdrop.

Mark Bradford’s multilayered works reveal his interest in the urban transformations and economics of South Los Angeles. Bradford’s technique involves building up a composition with layers of paper—often fragments of posters or ephemera salvaged from the street—that he soaks in water and combines with string, tape, and scraps of copy and magazine paper. He then sands down the collaged strata, exposing the under layers and excavating webs of embedded string, before building it up again with additional layers of collage. Repeating this process several times yields a ridged, mosaic-like surface, hinting at narrative while remaining largely abstract. The combination of dense networks of gridded passages and wavy lines with more open areas demarcated by layers of silver paper lends Bread and Circuses a cartographic character. The title invites a political reading, as it appropriates a Latin phrase that literally means “bread and circuses” and more broadly implies a form of appeasement, whereby a population is distracted from its poverty, disenfranchisement, or lack of mobility by superficial means of entertainment.

Not on view

Date
2007

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Found paper, metal foil, acrylic, and string on canvas

Dimensions
Overall: 134 1/4 × 253 1/2in. (341 × 643.9 cm)

Accession number
2008.42

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Patrick and Mary Scanlan

Rights and reproductions
© Mark Bradford

API
artworks/30548

Audio

July 12, 2015
Mark Joshua Epstein on Bread and Circuses by Mark Bradford

In 99 Objects

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July 12, 2015
Mark Joshua Epstein on Bread and Circuses by Mark Bradford

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Mark Bradford, Bread and Circuses, 2005

In America Is Hard to See

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Mark Bradford, Bread and Circuses, 2005

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Narrator: This collage by Mark Bradford is so big—at first, it might seem as if you should step back in order to see the whole thing. But come in close. It’s most interesting when you dig into the details.
Bradford found the materials for this work on the streets of a neighborhood in Los Angeles called South Central, where he grew up. There are advertisements, posters, and scraps of paper from all over. It’s kind of hard to tell exactly what any of them are, because Bradford pasted so many layers on top of each other. Then he painted over some of them, or sanded down their surfaces. He also put twine all over the surface, and sanded that down—which creates a network of lines all over. Everything ends up seeming very mixed together. For Bradford, that mix tells a kind of story about South Central, a neighborhood where people of many races and ethnicities live together. As he says, you might find a “Mexican taqueria next to the black wig shop across the street from the Korean nail shop.”