Bradford’s painting draws from ancient Greek myth to celebrate a space beloved to him: his mother’s beauty parlor.
Mark Bradford, Thelxiepeia, mixed media on canvas, 243.8 x 548.6 cm, 2016 (Art Bridges) © Mark Bradford. Speakers: Laura Vookles, Chair, Curatorial Department, Hudson River Museum and Steven Zucker, Smarthistory
0:00:06.6 Steven Zucker: We’re at the Hudson River Museum looking at an enormous painting that became quite famous when it was part of an exhibition that represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, perhaps the most prestigious art exhibition.
0:00:21.4 Laura Vookles: This is called Thelxiepeia. Thelxiepeia was one of the sirens of ancient Greek and Roman myth. And the whole installation was called Tomorrow is Another Day and took over an entire pavilion with mythological subject matter spun around this tale, where Mark Bradford saw himself as Hephaestus, the god of the forge. People have often looked to classical myth to retell stories that have to do with current lives.
0:00:51.3 Steven Zucker: But when we look at this, we don’t see Greek mythology as we would in a traditional 17th- or 18th-century painting. This is an abstraction.
0:01:01.7 Laura Vookles: It is abstract. And this is made with permanent wave papers that you use in beauty parlors. His mother owned a beauty parlor, and he spent a lot of time there. He worked there, and he felt like it was a very joyful, communal, protective space for Black women. And as himself, a gay Black man, he felt a sense of community there, and he felt very protected by these women. And if you look at the surface closely, a lot of them have rounded edges. He used a blowtorch to burn some of the edges to make it more apparent because they were so transparent that if he just varnished them onto the canvas, you wouldn’t see the edges as much. So they turn out with this very smoky, variable appearance.
0:01:47.0 Steven Zucker: Despite the fact that it is abstract, it is really a heroic painting. But the hero here is not Odysseus. And this story most famously comes down to us through Homer’s Odyssey. Instead, the hero here is the siren, and that reversal is expressed for me through this luscious surface. It is almost like a Byzantine mosaic in its tesserae that fill this surface. It’s a painting that is largely black, but it’s actually got all of this warmth in it, these warm reds and purples and violets that seem to sort of come through the surface almost as if the surface was liquid. And then there’s something else that happens for me, which is, of course, as I step back, I take this enormous painting in all at once, but because of the small squares that form these even striations across the surface horizontally, it almost feels like film strips. It almost feels like the frames of old movie reels. But for me, the film isn’t static. It’s moving, and there’s a wonderful sense of velocity, as if it’s telling multiple stories simultaneously.
0:02:54.8 Laura Vookles: There’s a wonderful sense of movement. You’d think it would be a grid, but the more you look at it, the more irregular it is. And the lines are wavering, and the degree of overlapping varies. And so everywhere you look, it’s full of activity.
0:03:10.6 Steven Zucker: But even as they seem as if these are images flying past us, because of the long horizontal lines that are formed, it almost seems like the waves of the sea. And that somehow we’re on Odysseus’s ship, we’re hearing these siren songs.
0:03:25.8 Laura Vookles: In evoking the Black beauty parlor that was so beloved to him, he is celebrating the beauty of Black women who have often been criticized for their type of beauty, particularly for their hair. And this whole piece is a celebration of Black women’s hair.
