1:12:31

“What’s foremost on my mind at this moment is sustainability. On many levels, I can kind of talk about that because as I watch everything slide away, as I watch people losing their jobs, as I watch museums closing down, as I watch actually sustainability being, slid out from under many people – essential workers, everything – especially me having a business in the past, I’m always thinking about the worker and how can they sustain themself. And artists. So it all kind of tumbles together for me.” — Mark Bradford

The Archives of American Art – one of our favorite resources here at Daily Plinth – recently began releasing the fruit of its ambitious Pandemic Oral History Project. Consisting of 77 interviews conducted with artistic leaders and luminaries over several months this summer, the Project “[forms] a chorus of resilience and despair, creation and loss… [conveying] the interconnectedness and vibrancy of the art world in 2020.”

For this interview, Nyssa Chow, lecturer and art historian, interviews the inimitable and inspirational Mark Bradford, in a conversation touching on topics ranging across economic sustainability, personal resilience, racial justice, politics, spiritual growth, and even art.

From The Archives of American Art:

To document the cascade of public health, social, and financial crises set in motion by COVID-19, the Archives of American Art created an oral history series that recorded responses to the global pandemic across the American art world. Conducted virtually, the Pandemic Oral History Project features eighty-five short-form interviews with a diverse group of artists, teachers, curators, and administrators. Averaging twenty-five minutes long, each interview provides a firsthand account of and urgent insights into the narrator’s triumphs and tragedies in the summer of 2020. With more than thirty hours of recorded video and audio, the series bears witness to an unprecedented era as it unfolded in real time.

For the selection of interviewees, we sought to capture diverse voices and multigenerational perspectives. The team continued to assess the breadth of narrators throughout the project, adjusting outreach as needed. When so many feel isolated and when traditional art spaces are disrupted and face existential risks, we are grateful to have reconnected with narrators already present in the Archives through personal papers, institutional records, and oral histories, while integrating many new voices into the collections.