Buffalo, NY – Today, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery opens a new exhibition, Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford, featuring the work of celebrated American artists Mark Bradford (born 1961) and Clyfford Still (1904–1980).

For the exhibition, Bradford—who was recently chosen as the United States’ representative at the next Venice Biennale in May of 2017—has selected more than twenty paintings from the Albright-Knox's important collection of works by Clyfford Still. In adjacent galleries, Bradford has presented a group of his own paintings—created specifically for this exhibition—that manifest an ongoing conversation both with Still’s own abstractions and the broader legacy of Abstract Expressionism.

Bradford has long been fascinated by Still’s extensive use of black as a signature component of his imagery and the many statements he made about the color. Still famously asserted that his own dramatic canvases, which he once called “black suns,” could even be hung in darkness because “they will carry their own fire.” “Black,” he proclaimed, “was never a color of death or terror for me. I think of it as warm—and generative. But color is what you choose to make it.” Such affirmative references to blackness were unparalleled in a 1950s America riven by the early rumblings of the Civil Rights movement and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. As an African American abstract painter, Bradford chooses to read Still’s relationship with black as an open-minded invitation to dialogue.

Bradford's new paintings continue his own exploration of abstraction’s power to address social and political concerns. Bradford has recently stated, “I think there are other ways of looking through abstraction. To use the whole social fabric of our society as a point of departure for abstraction reanimates it, dusts it off. I just find that chilling and amazing.” In this, Bradford finds Still a powerful inspiration.

The exhibition’s title is deliberately open to interpretation. Shade is an area of relative darkness; it is a zone obscured from the light or, in color theory, the mixture of a hue with black to reduce lightness. To “put someone in the shade” is to make his or her achievements seem comparatively insignificant, while to “throw shade,” an expression first deployed in the LGBTQ community, is to indirectly and artfully criticize. In parts of the United States prior to the 1960s, “shade” was also derogatory slang for an African American. As Albright-Knox Senior Curator Cathleen Chaffee, who organized the exhibition, describes it:

“'Shade' suggests the power of intergenerational dialogue to cast a canonical moment in American art history in a different light. Mark Bradford is reading Abstract Expressionism against the grain in order to enrich his practice and, profoundly, to color our own view of abstraction.” 

Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford is accompanied by a robust education program and a fully illustrated catalogue including an essay by Chaffee and a dialogue between Mark Bradford and Michael Auping, Chief Curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and former Chief Curator of the Albright-Knox. Bradford will be in conversation with Chaffee at the Albright-Knox during the exhibition’s free public opening at 7:15 pm on May 25, as part of the Emerging Voices in Contemporary Art Lecture Series. 

The First Niagara Foundation is proud to serve as the official Education Sponsor of this exhibition. Their sponsorship will underwrite free admission to the exhibition for all K–12 students in Erie County and their art teachers during the months of July and August. It has also provided a special program that welcomed Mark Bradford to the Buffalo Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts (PS 192) for an artist talk and community event on May 24.

This exhibition has been made possible through the generosity of First Niagara Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Charles W. Banta, Jay Goldman, Hauser & Wirth Inc., Deborah Ronnen, and Amy and Harris Schwalb.

Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford will travel to the Denver Art Museum and the Clyfford Still Museum and will be on view in both venues from April 9 to July 16, 2017.

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Clyfford Still (American, 1904-1980) achieved national and international recognition following successful exhibitions in San Francisco and New York in the 1940s, and, along with peers such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, he was a central figure in midcentury American painting. In an effort to maintain control over his work, Still largely retreated from the art world and settled in rural Maryland in 1961. Still’s daring use of color set in expansive fields solidified his place as a leading figure in both Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting.

In 1959, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (then the Albright Art Gallery) presented the first large-scale survey exhibition of Clyfford Still’s career; it included seventy-two paintings dating from 1936 to 1957. In 1964, Still gave the museum thirty-one paintings. This donation joined two works already in the museum’s collection, bringing the number of his works in Buffalo to thirty-three. Today, the Albright-Knox is the largest repository of the artist’s work outside the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

Mark Bradford (American, born 1961) is one of his generation’s most celebrated artists. His abstractions are often crafted from layered paper and other commonplace materials that reference the diverse Southern California neighborhood in which he lives. Bradford has received numerous awards and honors, including the U.S. State Department’s Medal of Arts (2015), the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant” (2009), and the Bucksbaum Award, granted by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2006). In 2015, Bradford cofounded Art + Practice, an arts and education foundation based in Leimert Park, Los Angeles.

Bradford’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work is represented in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Bradford lives and works in Los Angeles. 

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