Inside the tower of the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side, the artist Mark Bradford paused beneath broad, three-story-tall windows, rummaging through a capacious cardboard box. “I grew up in a beauty salon,” Bradford said as he pulled out tangles of rope, caulk and torn strips of billboard. “I like to travel with my stuff.”
Piercing light illuminates Bradford’s titanic new painting, “City of the Big Shoulders,” a 38-foot-tall patchwork of colors, commissioned for the Obama Foundation, conceived and scaled for the museum’s atrium — a surprisingly airy, cheerful space given the staunch, monumental mien of the tower’s exterior.
An object in the box caught Bradford’s eye: a translucent piece of orange paper marbled with shades of tangerine and marmalade. Bradford, who is warm and playful in person, held the rectangle up to the window light.
With a few swift, balletic gestures, all 6-feet-8 inches of him climbed onto a nearby scissor lift. He pasted the paper directly onto the giant canvas. His long, salon-trained fingers smoothed its edges. What was once a muted banana-yellow section of the mural was now a flare of light.
Bradford descended to ground level, stepped back and studied his work. “It’s like it was always meant to be there,” he said, delighted. “I always leave room for chaos.”
