My third grade classroom was practically an authoritarian state.

I grew up within the confines of a small Catholic school where unconventionality was, for all intents and purposes, a sin.

From the age of five to thirteen I wore a black and grey uniform with socks that covered my ankles and I listened to everything I was told. When we walked to class, there were rules. When we sat in church, there were rules. When we spoke, there were rules. Even when we did art, the most limitless form of expression, there were rules.

If you messed up, you were urged to start anew until all around the classroom hung twenty five identically cut out snowflakes from twenty five brilliantly unique nine year olds.

But you would never know that.

It was a tragedy I wouldn’t understand until years later, but one in which I am now grateful for. If I hadn’t spent so many of my formative years suffocating under the calloused thumb of conformity, I never would have appreciated freedom when it did come. For in high school, while my peers were disillusioned with the horrors of public education, I was busy basking in the glory of my own identity. For the first time in my life I could wear whatever I wanted and it never got old. It was there in that shotty public high school that I learned to craft meaning through expression. Everyday a blank canvas in which to convey my story through a hat, a belt, a really funky pair of jeans. It seemed a miracle to me that I could say something about myself without ever opening my mouth. I could weave vintage scarves into my braids and layer turtlenecks under dresses and wear old skirts from the 40s. I could bead bracelets and earrings that no one else would ever have. I could take something questionable and turn it into a statement and no one would call my mother. When I wore something unconventional, it was my way of protesting the suppression of individuality that wreaked havoc on my youth. I wore patterns loud enough to shout that differences are beautiful and should be celebrated, not homogeneously molded.

So nevermind Catholicism, I found my religion within vintage boutiques and thrift stores.

UNCONVENTIONAL ART AS A SALVE

I pay my reverence to individuality and self-expression. I write in hot pink pens just to be obnoxious. I wear chartreuse dresses with puffy sleeves and I watch the world accept me as I am. I want to tell you something about me within the first moment of our meeting. My earrings speak for me. My Birkenstocks and flared jeans tell a story all their own. I have six piercings and I wear dangly earrings from most of them because that would never be allowed in the place I grew from. I am drawn to things that shouldn’t work because I want to see if they can.

This desire to push the boundaries of what can and cannot produce meaning in this world is something that contemporary artists Mark Bradford (1961-) and José Parlá (1973-) understand well.

MARK BRADFORD

Bradford builds his art around unconventional materials such as advertisement posters and endpapers from salons in order to convey a larger truth about the places in which they originate. His finished pieces are heavily saturated in themes of exposure, manipulation, memory, community, and ambiguity.

Endlessly working within the paradox of making and unmaking, Bradford uses these themes to demonstrate the rhythm in which we dance our lives to — that of coming together and pulling apart. In one of his works, titled “Juice” (2003), the entire canvas is covered in markings from the endpapers that he grew up watching his mother use in her solan.

There is no rhyme or reason, as evident in the mysterious placement of the word “juice” in the middle of it all, but this ambiguity is what makes Bradford’s work so iconic. For it is his ode to the place that grew him and everything he took from it, both literally and metaphorically. The endpapers, the entities with their seemingly singular use, serve as materials of memory from the world in which he found his first community, the world in which he began to want to say something about. They are the representation of his beginning, of the place he grew from, and of his debut into the art world.

In one of his later works, titled “The King’s Mirror” (2014), Bradford extrapolates his work with unconventional materials by using advertisement posters from the lower-income streets of Los Angeles to form a massive work of art that forces one to stop and stare.

This is his intention, for the posters are live scams that were put up with the hopes of exploiting the poverty ridden neighborhoods in which he grew up in. Bradford takes the posters and scratches away at them, paints over them, builds upon them, in order to ironically manipulate the manipulator’s tool.

He objectifies the advertisement companies in the same way that they sought to objectify marginalized communities — boldly for everyone to see. He takes something that would be ignored by most and forces you to look right at it, right at the realities that plague our society.

By doing so, Bradford excavates a profound message regarding the ways in which we choose to view the things that don’t immediately concern us. His work, the ambiguity and liminality of it, thus “[forces] you to stay in a place where thinking is still necessary” (Sebastian Smee). This idea, this leaving the observer to actively participate in the thought process of his art, is why Bradford’s work is so profoundly engaging.

JOSÉ PARLÁ

Similar in engagement and in themes of exposing marginalization is Parlá’s exhibit, “It’s Yours” (2020), where he brings unconventional street style art into a gleaming white exhibit for everyone to come in and see.

Located in the Bronx, Parlá seeks, through the use of graffiti-esque artwork, to especially bring marginalized groups into the gallery and show them that there is a space for them in what is often thought treated as an elitist world of art. He aims to excavate the concept that street art is art and deserves a space among highfalutin galleries. In doing so, he “exposes the suffering caused by redlining, gentrification, and displacement in the Bronx” (Enman) and plays with themes of unification and community as a salve.

Each person can be seen as a line tracing their way through his murals as they would trace their way through the streets of New York City — scattered and ever-entangled in the paths of all of those around them.

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