Peter Bradley and Eric N. Mack may be nearly 50 years apart in age, but they share a passion for making art that resists easy interpretation. Bradley, 86, creates luscious abstract paintings by pouring, dribbling, and throwing acrylic across the surface of the canvas. Mack, 39, identifies as a painter, but his work has steadily moved away from the wall, and he has never bothered with acrylic or oil. Instead, he uses fabric to alter spaces big and small.
The two artists’ careers have taken very different trajectories. Bradley dropped out of the Yale School of Art in 1968, frustrated by professors who constantly sought to collapse his work and his identity. Mack got his MFA from the same school in 2012.
Bradley went on to hold a variety of art-related jobs: he managed jazz tours, installed art at the Guggenheim, and sold art at New York’s Perls Galleries. (As one of the city’s first Black art dealers, Bradley connected top collectors with works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Alexander Calder.) He is perhaps most famous, however, for his work as a curator. In 1971, at a former movie theater in Houston, Texas, he mounted “The De Luxe Show,” one of the first racially integrated art exhibitions in the United States and a now-legendary moment in the history of American abstraction. His own painting practice received renewed attention in 2021, when he signed with Karma gallery.
Mack, on the other hand, gained prominence as an artist quickly. He was included in one of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s closely watched shows for emerging artists the same year he graduated from Yale, and had a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2019. A native of Columbia, Maryland, whose parents worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, he has cited the city’s Color School, a group of painters who sought to infuse the canvas with pure color through staining and pouring, as a key early influence.
Despite their varied paths, Bradley and Mack are part of this greater lineage of artists who embrace the poetic, political, and pleasurable potential of abstraction and color. Through March 15, they share the floor in “Hard Art,” an ambitious survey organized by MoMA PS1 that brings together three generations of Black abstractionists and takes its title from Bradley’s description of “The De Luxe Show.” Ahead of the exhibition’s opening, Mack traveled to Bradley’s lovingly renovated, plant-filled farmhouse in Upstate New York to talk about their shared passion for color, their varied influences, and why the definition of painting is more expansive than one might think.
Peter Bradley: Where’s your studio?
Eric N. Mack: My studio is in South Street Seaport in Manhattan. I’ve only been there for five years right now—
Bradley: That’s a long time for the studio.
Mack: Yeah. I was in the South Bronx for nine years before that. It’s really nice to be here.
Bradley: Thank you for coming.
Mack: I was able to see your [1973] painting Circle of Fifths that’s gonna be in “Hard Art.”
Bradley: What did you think of it?
Mack: I like it because it feels very natural. It reminds me of moss. It’s a whole landscape in a way. I respond so much to the color. What comes first?
Bradley: The canvas.
Mack: Right.
Bradley: Color supersedes subject matter. That’s a [Clement] Greenberg concept, and I was able to get it on the canvas.
Mack: I respond a lot to your process. So you wet the canvas first, and the paint absorbs into it. But it’s kind of like a [Helen] Frankenthaler gesture in a way. I relate it to that kind of history of the soaked canvas.
Bradley: I went to Frankenthaler’s studio a couple of times, but I wasn’t painting that way. I’m wetting these canvases because I am out here in the country. In the city, you can’t wet them; the neighbors will say a bunch of shit. Here, you can soak it up and get the paint to dry into the surface of the canvas.
Mack: What about these [points to works tacked up to the wall in the studio]?
Bradley: The process is usually that I’ll paint on an unstretched canvas on the platform. Then I can get on the ladder and look down. Then it goes on the wall, and we’ll crop it from there into a finished painting. Do you crop your paintings?
Mack: Yeah, I do. I sew my pictures.
Bradley: You do what?
Mack: I sew them. I use different fabrics instead of canvas.
Bradley: I’ll do that next. [Laughs]
Mack: And then sometimes I spray it kind of like the way you spray it. Or you don’t spray it, you swirl it? Tell me more about how you apply the paint.
Bradley: I put it in a bucket with water and stir it up with an electric drill and pour it on the canvas. Sometimes I use bamboo sticks from my garden.
Mack: How long have you been working with acrylic paint?
Bradley: Fifty years, probably longer. They’d give me paint on the weekends in Pennsylvania [where Bradley grew up] when I was in fifth or sixth grade. And I paint on the floor. You paint on the floor?
Mack: I have, yes. That’s the good way for the fabric to absorb the paint. But I really was thinking a lot about staining. I love staining. The history of staining canvas is so important to me. Is [Color Field painter] Morris Louis somebody you think about at all?
Bradley: I knew him. I think about Greenberg the most. He’d come in the studio with a bottle of wine to smoke and talk and get things done.
Mack: Red or white?
Bradley: Red. He never did drink white wine.
Mack: So if he tripped and fell, he could just add to the painting, huh?
Bradley: He would talk all the time. He’d give you concepts. He was a terrific guy.
Mack: Wow.
Bradley: But he’s dead. You can’t talk to him. [Laughs]
Mack: I’ll read some essays, I guess, and light a candle, you know?
Bradley: Are you from New York?
Mack: I’m from outside of Washington, DC. I moved to New York, like, 20 years ago.
Bradley: Where do you live now, man?
Mack: I live in Harlem. You lived in Harlem for a little while, didn’t you?
Bradley: I lived in Lenox Terrace in Harlem when I first moved to New York, and then I moved downtown. Too many guys talked about being artists, but they were bullshitting.
Mack: [Laughs] Should I show you some of my work?
Bradley: Yeah, please!
Mack: I’ll show you some of my early paintings. I started using acrylic on pegboard.
Bradley: What’s a pegboard?
Mack: It’s that thing with the dots in the hardware stores and you put a little hook into it and people sell different things from it. But I started to work with more textiles because I love the grid and it would allow for some of the draping to happen. Another reason why I like the pegboard is the dots. So I would put up a screen, and I would push the paint through the screen. And it would…
Bradley: Pick up the dots. Terrific.
Mack: These are paintings and works on paper using fabric dye. So I would spray the fabric dye on the paper to create a shape. I’ve been starting to do installation works, with the fabric draped from an architectural structure.
Bradley: That’s interesting. Let’s go back to that so I can figure it out.
Mack: I made this piece that resembles a mobile inspired by Calder, but with the fabric draping around it like a support structure.
Bradley: I worked with Calder for 10 years.
Mack: Didn’t Calder bring you to Perls [Galleries]?
Bradley: I was working at the Guggenheim and installed the Calder show with him, and then Perls picked me up. They paid me more money and let me drive my Ferrari. [Your material] is clothes, right?
Mack: Yeah. Some of it is silk, some is cotton, there’s a little bit of canvas here that I’ve sprayed to dye it. And so that ends up being an early part of my process, like a cumulative process. [Points to a vertical line in Plight Element, 2025] I added this extra cloth on it to hold the gesture that I want. So it would appear like a brushstroke, almost.
Bradley: Yeah, that’s a brushstroke.
Mack: You’re seeing this relationship with color. That’s what I relate to your work a lot, the play. This is another work [Capital Heights (via Stretch), 2019], you can walk inside. It’s like a tent. It’s kind of close to what I’m showing at PS1 for “Hard Art.”
Bradley: That’s hard art, for sure.
Mack: This [Halter, 2019] is a big piece I did in the desert in the Coachella Valley. It was such a difficult work to do.
Bradley: And probably difficult to install.
Mack: Yeah. I went on the rooftop, secured it to the top of the building, and then tried to manage how much wind went through.
Bradley: Because when wind hits it wrong, it would take the building up.
Mack: Yeah, pretty much. [Laughs] I had to tie it all up.
Bradley: That’s a nice fabric.
Mack: It’s from Italy, from Missoni. Are you familiar with them? They make these beautiful woven fabrics. This is my installation [Flourish, 2023]. The colors, all these different things with the textile. This one’s like a felt—the kind of cloth you’d see at a car wash.
Bradley: I never wash my car.
Mack: My dad used to have a car wash.
Bradley: Oh, so you know about it?
Mack: A little bit. All of my dad’s cars are white, and that’s how you know he could keep them clean.
Bradley: I had Ferraris; I didn’t ever clean them.
Mack: Somebody did, though.
Bradley: No, they were all fucked up.
Mack: [Laughs] What color?
Bradley: Chocolate brown, what other color could they be? When I bought ’em, they were red, and I painted them chocolate brown.
Mack: Gorgeous.
Bradley: Me and Miles Davis were the only Black men I knew who had Ferraris, and Miles couldn’t drive.
Mack: Like me.
Bradley: You can’t drive?
Mack: I can’t drive. So you hung out with Miles?
Bradley: Yeah, Miles and [Art] Blakey. I was on tour with Blakey’s band, driving and tour managing.
Mack: Was it a good time?
Bradley: Too good a time. [Laughs] It was amazing they were still alive. I’ve never seen anybody do as many drugs as those guys did.
Mack: Who are some of your favorite artists of all time?
Bradley: Well, Picasso, Braque. Braque was better than Picasso because he never got played out. He really was special. So, what are you doing now? Do you garden at all?
Mack: I have a couple of plants I try to keep alive; I really like orchids a lot. There’s one in my studio that’s just kind of dormant.
Bradley: What kind of orchid is it?
Mack: I don’t know. I got it from Trader Joe’s.
Bradley: Find out the name of it, and then go in on that species. They’re all different. Did you get it to bloom?
Mack: It bloomed twice.
Bradley: Then you’re lucky. You know what you’re doing.
Why make art now?
Bradley: Because I’ve been making it my whole life and I will continue to.
Mack: In these doubtful times, I’ve always felt compelled to make with my hands. It’s a tangible way to think through form and understand the world and the materials I’m drawn to.
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