Amendment #8

Mark Bradford, Amendment #8, 2014, mixed media, 48 ¹⁄₄ × 60 in. (122.6 × 152.4 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Lohrfink Foundation and museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2015.34, © 2014, Mark Bradford

Artwork Details

Title: Amendment #8
Artist: Mark Bradford
Date: 2014
Location: Smithsonian American Art Museum
/
3rd Floor
/
East Wing
Dimensions: 48 ¹⁄₄ × 60 in. (122.6 × 152.4 cm)
Copyright: © 2014, Mark Bradford
Credit Line: Gift of the Lohrfink Foundation and museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Mediums Description: mixed media
Classifications: Painting
Mixed Media
Highlights: African American Art
Contemporary Art
Subjects: Abstract
Object Number: 2015.34
Linked Open Data: https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/2015.34

Artwork Description

What words or phrases can you make out on the surface of this painting? The text comes from the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, which forbids the use of "cruel and unusual punishments."

This work is part of a series Mark Bradford made about the Bill of Rights. Inspired by the idea that a piece of paper could embody fundamental human liberties, Bradford used paper as his medium--wetting it, building it up, and scraping it down so that it became a dense cake of multicolored pulp.

The words are buried within the paper's layers. While some are visible, most float in and out of legibility, just as certain people and ideas have come into focus at different times in our history. Reflecting on the Constitution, Bradford marvels that "we will never understand the entire document. . . . Its meaning glimmers."

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Artist Mark Bradford discusses his use of materials, his interest in abstraction, and his thoughts on having Amendment #8 in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

MARK BRADFORD: The materials that I use and have really always used have always been paper. The tools of civilization, how we build and destroy ourself, are the materials that I'm really interested in, and paper is one of the main ways in which information is displayed. Paper in itself is simply a bunch of fragments held together by a binder. I always saw it as pigment dried in a binder and cut into eight and a half by eleven blocks. Just in my head I thought, "Oh, well, you just have to wet it so that it can move like paint."

What constitutes a painting, and who are the gatekeepers of that?

I'm sure that me being a painter was a very political gesture for me. If you're Black and from South Central, you have a lot of identity stuff that you could just fall right into. I just thought I was going to do abstract work, but it was going to talk about race, class, culture, and all these things, but I was going to do it from an abstraction place, which gave me freedom. Then I was going to look outside. I wasn't going to do this kind of hermetic, interior, close the world off, which is historically what we understand abstraction as being. I was going to have a relationship with the world and with politics because I was interested in those things.

I was really starting to get very interested in the foundations of our country. The Amendments, or the Bill of Rights, are still what we go to. Interesting enough, it is on paper. I mean, it is one of our historical documents, one of our most important documents are on paper. We put paper in the photocopier, so it's both precious and not precious at all. It's both protected by security guards and shredded.

So "Amendment #8" is actually part of the "Bill of Rights" series. There are certain fragments that cling to the edges of the composition. Certain words flow in and out, they're legible and not legible, they hint, but in some ways that's how we really do understand the dense documents. We will never fully understand. They're so dense, but we pull, and we glimmer, and we dive, and we project onto these documents. At the time of the Constitution, certain people weren't even human, women didn't have rights, so we moved them forward as the country moves forward. We amend what we excluded in a way.

What better place than the Smithsonian to have an Amendment painting? It just fits; it makes sense. If you look at what's going on in the media at the moment with Black male bodies and me being a Black male and doing an Amendment painting and sitting in the Smithsonian—that's just super layered.