Scholar's Convocation
Associate Professor Vance Byrd
Unearthing the Past in Mark Bradford's Pickett's Charge
In this talk, Vance Byrd addresses how the African-American painter Mark Bradford questions American history and the limits of panoramic representation through his material and physical practice Pickett’s Charge. For the artist, appropriation is not a spoliation or a violent iconoclastic gesture done unto the original oil painting. Rather than using burnt end papers or found merchant posters from his Los Angeles neighborhood, Bradford quotes and recomposes the original cyclorama image through digital collage (modification of scale, pixilation, juxtaposition and mirroring, augmented color, repetition) and his physical labor of décollage (cutting, tearing, picking, lateral pulls of cord underneath paper, burns, application of liquids and adhesives). By making destruction and ruination visible, Bradford rejects the communication of a conventional narrative about defeat, victory, and reconcilitation in the American Civil War.
Webex Link: https://grinnellcollege.webex.com/grinnellcollege/onstage/g.php?MTID=e8446c94299c73ef1ca2fdd951f3f0b0f