Mark Bradford: Untitled (A–Z), 2010

Mark Bradford’s alphabet builds on an ongoing body of work called “merchant posters,” wherein the artist collects local business advertisements in his South Los Angeles neighborhood. Bradford layers and sands down these once-posted signs–featuring phrases such as “Stop Evictions” and “Affordable Daycare"–abstracting their original messaging so that only fragments remain. The result is twenty-six individual works on paper, each depicting a single letter from the English alphabet. By isolating the letters from their original context, they become more symbolic than functional, alluding to the social and economic systems that impact the lives of the people in the community where the materials were found.