Episode #001: From his home in Los Angeles, artist Mark Bradford shares childhood memories of creating films with friends. Set against a backdrop from the artist's own collection of Super 8 footage, the movies reveal aspects of the artist's childhood, as collected through his own perspective. “As a kid, I would lay down on this grass and look up at the sky and I would see clouds.” Bradford recounts, “And I remember one day, I told my friends, 'I’m going to make a movie, and we’re all going to watch a movie, and it’s going to be free...and I was going to project it on the cloud.”

Mark Bradford transforms materials scavenged from the street into wall-sized collages and installations that respond to the impromptu networks—underground economies, migrant communities, or popular appropriation of abandoned public space—that emerge within a city. Bradford's work is as informed by his personal background as a third-generation merchant in Los Angeles as it is by the tradition of abstract painting developed worldwide in the twentieth century.

Learn more about the artist:
http://www.art21.org/artists/mark-bradford

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Monte Matteotti. Artwork courtesy: Mark Bradford. © 2008 Art21, Inc.