Bradford Branch

Bradford Branch (b. 1952, Brooklyn, NY) is an artist whose prints, collages, and drawings explore realism and representational abstraction through still lifes. His artistic inclination was evident from an early age; while still in elementary school, he received a scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum Art School. This experience primed him to continue to pursue the arts in high school and college—attending Newark High School of Fine and Industrial Arts and, in college, pursuing a higher degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. After graduating, Branch worked in full-time and freelance roles across the couture industry, in early years, as an illustrator and pattern maker, and, later, as a designer of childrenswear for brands including Anne Klein and Jacob Smith. 

The shock of learning that he was HIV-positive led Branch to reevaluate his life and what he wanted to accomplish; leaving behind his design work, he turned to the visual arts full time. Returning to media learned in his youth while drawing upon the skills accrued over his years in fashion, he explored a vast array of processes including etching, monoprints, reduction linoleum cuts, cut-paper collage, chine collée, ink drawings, and graphite renderings. He found himself increasingly drawn away from the iterability of traditional printmaking and toward methods that produced unique, painterly images. Informed by the work of Black artists Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, as well as Cubists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris, Branch’s compositions celebrate color, value, line, and shape. Exploring the simultaneity of multiple perspectives, he deconstructs and reassembles objects such as vases, oranges, pussy willows, and forsythia. Of his work, he has expressed an interest in cultivating presence, writing, “If it can draw you in, you are in that moment. When you're there in the moment, you're not thinking about the future...you're not thinking about the past...you're simply there...and you can be grateful." 

Branch has been an active member of artistic and social-justice-focused communities including the Art Students League of New York, which granted him a merit scholarship in 1993; the Harlem School of the Arts; and People of Color in Crisis (POCC), a nonprofit organization that was dedicated to serving New York’s LGBTQ+ community of color. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions, most notably in A Time for Healing, an exhibition of work by HIV-positive Black artists presented at the Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Community Center in 2001; a solo exhibition presented at POCC in 2006; and a solo exhibition at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in 2008. Branch’s prints have also seen commercial success, printed on the covers of publications produced by the Book of the Month Club and used in pamphlets for the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, an organization that spearheaded efforts to provide mental health support to those with HIV; mock-ups of some of these covers and announcements appear among his archival records.