Zimmerli Museum Receives Gift Including Mark Bradford, Nicole Eisenman

There’s a tradition stretching back at least a quarter century of artists creating designs for skateboard decks; streetwear brand Supreme launched it by commissioning artists in 2000, and examples bearing imagery by artists from Raymond Pettibon to Judy Chicago have become highly collectible. Where artist-designed decks are typically visually bold and colorful, this contribution to the genre by artist Darren Bader includes references to a range of Japanese pop-cultural phenomena, but, hilariously, strips away their visual pyrotechnics and reduces them to black text on a white background.

Mark Bradford famously spent parts of his youth at his mother’s South Los Angeles beauty shop, where he was in charge of painting signs. Materials from that environment were often integrated into his early collage-paintings, and at the first Art Basel Miami Beach, in 2002, he set up an installation, Foxyé Hair, a beauty-shop-cum-artwork. Miss China Silk is one image in a four-part photographic series features Asian models with African-inspired hairstyles, posed before African-inspired textiles, as a commentary on identity in an age of globalization. The year after creating this work, Bradford would win the $100,000 Bucksbaum Award at the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

Troy Lamarr Chew II transforms the classic Campbell’s Soup can, which Andy Warhol famously depicted in one of Pop art’s most famous images, into “the can,” a slang term for jail. The title refers to CorrLinks and JPay, systems for electronically communicating with incarcerated people, and echoes a call for liberation of those behind bars by various musicians. Several dogs are chained in an outdoor enclosure, while aloft in the sky are numerous kites; “kite” is a slang term for secret notes among prison inmates. 

This mixed-media drawing, recalling scenes of the Crucifixion and images of lynchings, shows a central figure tied to a post, surrounded by more than a dozen figures, some armed, one seemingly grinning and brandishing a knife. Two seem to cradle a third figure, reclining, as if in a scene showing the Deposition from the Cross. Per the museum, it “explores power dynamics, persecution, and mob mentality.”

American photographer Lee Friedlander is renowned for his scenes of urban streets incorporating candid images of people in their everyday activities. He took up residence in New York in 1956, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960, two years before he shot this photo. As in this image, his works often include signage and reflections in windows. Here, a stout man and a young boy look out from behind the window of an ice cream shop, in which the street outside is reflected, thus interweaving inside and out.

Hancock’s bright-hued works explore a personal mythology, an absurdist parable of good and evil that includes a battle between the evil Vegans and the meat-eating Mounds (half-human, half-plant mutants). Sesom, a Vegan, discovers the liberating power of color in a dream, and begins to craft miracle machines that create life-affirming color blasts. Hancock’s work wraps up his own life experience with references to art history, superhero comics, pulp fiction, and an array of other pop-cultural inspirations.

Alice Mackler, who died in 2024 at 92 years of age, garnered the attention of New York critics, including the New York Times’s Roberta Smith, only starting in her 80s. She created lumpy female figures in ceramic, then painted features onto them, achieving highly individualized personalities, as ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger wrote. Mackler was discovered in 2013, when a partner at New York gallery James Fuentes met her at a class at Greenwich House Pottery. She would go on to be featured in a Jewish Museum group show and see her work enter the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection.