MPAS Critical Conversations: Mark Bradford and Rick Lowe

March 2, 2010
6:00 PM - 8:50 PM
Lecture Forum
Graduate Fine Arts Building
3001 S. Flower Street
Los Angeles, CA 90007

Mark Bradford is a Los Angeles-based artist. His recent solo exhibitions include Nobody Jones at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; Neither New Nor Correct at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Niagara at LAXART. Bradford\'s work has appeared in important group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Royal Academy of the Arts in London, and many, many more. He won the Bucksbaum Award at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and in 2009 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Bradford earned his BFA and MFA at CalArts.

Rick Lowe is an artist, architect, urban designer, developer, businessman, and activistwho is a catalyst for social outreach for underserved neighborhoods. Lowe’s early founding of Project Row House in Houston’s Third Ward in 1993 became the template for others to follow to bring local people together to engage their own creative energies and aesthetic values to produce a “collective expression” to reinstate a community. Lowe’s socially engaged methodology helps individuals excavate talents that they might have either forgotten about or just lost sight of. An example of his progressive thinking can be seen in a recent concept for a series of small businesses that draws on local individual’s abilities—such as homemade cookies and laundry service—and turns them into emerging noted talents and proprietors. Lowe is the 2009 USA Booth Fellow in Architecture and Design. [bio thanks to United States Artists]

Image: Mark Bradford, Let\'s Make Christmas Mean Something This Year, 2007, mixed media collage on canvas, 102 x 144".