Mark Bradford stands in front of a wall where his sweeping, detailed, rough-hewn mixed-media work Go Tell It On the Mountain hangs. He is telling a man holding a large camera about the duality of this piece.
While there’s a lightness, there’s also strength, says Bradford, the famed Los Angeles-based painter. “That’s kind of all of us right now. There’s a vulnerability in the air, a fragileness, an uncertainty, unease. There will be bad times, but there will be good times, too.”
Bradford might be standing in front of one person in Venice, Italy, but in reality, he is on the world’s stage—and so, in turn, is the Baltimore Museum of Art. Bradford’s work makes up the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the world’s preeminent art show, which opens Saturday.
Right alongside him are 11 BMA staff members, including director Christopher Bedford, who captured this conversation for his own social media followers. They have been tasked with presenting Bradford’s work—which includes two sculptures, six canvases, and a video—to the world at the art event that occurs every two years, and where 86 nations will compete for the prized Golden Lion awards that will be handed out on Saturday to the best pavilion and best individual artist.
“The great appeal to us at the BMA is that everybody who’s important to us as well as people we would never know see this exhibition,” Bedford said previously about his staff’s role at the Biennale.
Bedford also called Bradford the ideal artist to represent the U.S. “He belongs to a peer group of principally black, American artists who have changed the way that we collectively think about social change as precipitated by the actions of artists.”
Baltimore has another reason to be proud at this year’s Biennale. Famed Baltimore filmmaker John Waters has contributed art to the Biennale’s centerpiece, Vive Arte Viva, along with 119 artists from around the world.
The BMA presented the U.S. entry into the competition once before, in 1960. The storied Baltimore institution is co-presenting the U.S. Pavilion with the U.S. State Department and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, which Bedford headed before moving to Baltimore last August.
Along with the staff members, who are staying in Venice for periods ranging from days to weeks, members of the board of trustees and donors will attend Saturday’s opening.
Baltimore will get the opportunity to see Bradford’s work in September 2018, after the Biennale closes in November. Bedford says there will likely be a social component to Bradford’s work as well.
Bedford said his aim is for the Biennale to further the role of the BMA in the world.
“I have full confidence that Mark’s show will be one of the extraordinary events in Venice in 2017, so I would like a broad public acknowledgement of Mark’s greatness and of the BMA’s instrumental role in advancing that in the world,” Bedford said. “I hope that this sets the bar for us so that there is this level of national and international attention very regularly.”