Duck Walk

This diptych is an ambivalent homage to the artist Clyfford Still and his "black paintings" from the late 1940s, with respect to the American modernist canon, and at the same time a riposte in the spirit of a contest.

Bradford's practice argues for a politically charged, socially grounded abstraction: the gritty materiality of his paintings quite literally invoke the socioeconomic and cultural contingencies of the neighborhoods in which he grew up and still works in South Central LA.

Duck Walk started with a heavy black paper ground—the opposite of the customary primed white ground of a canvas. 

The pitted surface is achieved by repeatedly gouging, tearing, incising, and sanding down each stage of layering, exposing the strata of its history of creation. For Bradford, this is "a more honest way . . . to represent the social fabric of my neighborhoods, and this country."

Duck Walk is named for a dance move popular in the historically African American queer culture of "ballroom" voguing in urban subculture. It is as if the ruptured surface of the painting could be understood as a skin that has been wounded or transformed.

"I don't think it's possible to have a black body and not view that color through the lens of politics in the United States," Bradford has stated, adding that "I don't think of black as an identity. I think of it as a characteristic, a material fact."