What Else Can Art Do?

Mark Bradford is the tallest artist I know—six feet seven and a half inches, and pencil thin, which makes him look taller. His paintings, as you’d expect, run large. When I visited Bradford’s industrial-sized studio, in South Los Angeles, this spring, one wall was almost entirely covered by a huge outline map of the United States, with clusters of numbers that represented the AIDS cases reported in each state up to 2009. The map was a study for a much larger