This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Mark Bradford’s studio is in an old beauty salon his mother owned in Leimert Park, South Central LA. Like many of his works, this painting incorporates permanent-wave end papers used in the salon, which he collages with scraps of billboards, posters, and signs that he gathers from the neighborhood. The materials are torn, layered, erased, and sanded to become the painting. The artist describes himself as a “postmodern flâneur”—riffing off poet Charles Baudelaire’s 1860s description of the “idle man about town” strolling through the Paris streets. Bradford applies this practice to the contemporary urban landscape with its shifting demographics and economies.