Creative Current

Interviews with Los Angeles artists, actors and musicians.

Mark Steven Greenfield

Known to the L.A. art world from his tenures heading the Watts Towers and later Department of Cultural Affairs programs, way before that, Mark Steven Greenfield earned an MFA from Cal State LA, where he focused on painting and drawing. He’s been making and showing art steadily all this time, but for a number of very good reasons — having to do both with the usual time-suck of a demanding day-job as well as a specific desire not to be seen to be competing with the very same artists whose activities he oversaw at that job — not that many people really knew about that. But in the past three years since (mostly) leaving the public sector he’s really made up for lost time, with a growing pile of shows, grants, residencies, and curatorial projects on his cv. Greenfield has a penchant for working in series and a gift for puns — but through all his projects, one major theme is asserted consistently, and that is the urgency of paying attention to the history and persistence of harmful African-American stereotypes in our culture. An exhibition of his most recent series, Animalicious, is currently on view at Offramp Gallery, and on the occasion, Greenfield speaks to Shana Nys Dambrot about those works (based on the checkered past of 20th-century cartoon and commercial images) as well as powerful and smartly subversive previous series like Incognegro, Blackatcha, Mammygrams, and the acclaimed Doo-Dahz works, which are based on historical portraits of blackface actors and created by a free-associative drawing technique in which the political content remains undeniable — transforming icons of mocking oppression into art objects with power and beauty and slightly twisted sense of humor.

markstevengreenfield.com

offrampgallery.com

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