Bradford’s use of hair-salon endpapers as collage material informs the gridded surfaces of his painted works, which like the décollage of Raymond Haines or Jacques Villaglé, incorporate scavenged vestiges of the urban environment. The repetition of form prevalent in these works he describes as like a punctuation mark in the “delicate dance of language”—the way language is repeated and transferred through repetition to assume variative forms, and punctuated through their iteration. Mining childhood memories of his South Los Angeles neighborhood, Bradford’s fondly commemorative lens inscribes the urban form as personal.
Bradford has been widely exhibited internationally and represented the US at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. He completed the monumental four-hundred-foot commission Pickett’s Charge for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and a thirty-two panel site-specific commission We The People at the US Embassy in London, both also in 2017.