Souls are raised after 85 years of silence, from a chaotic map of nowhere to go.
Burned by a bright angry red on top,
The dark broken town is scraped from forgotten papers and documents.
No, you can’t fight.
Your depressed lives are constrained by a hegemonic whisper.
Occupies 3/4 of the painting, the black town can’t escape from pieces of uniformed white houses around.
No, you must fight.
Your dirty face must be laid down above the fire.
Diagonally reaching to the top part of the red field, the black town bursts a roar from its wobbly blocks.
Now and then the streets are not the same,
underlying the colors is a gradient from life to tragedy, to denial.
The massacre mutes the sound of this once wonderful land.
On the map you barely see a light, but strings of messy roads.
Mixed sentiments and emotions are rooted in every colorful household,
now they become noises that blur the geographic lines of the old neighborhoods.
Blurs the smoke, hides the sun, scorches the fragmentary black bodies.
Weak breaths are wandering on the fuzzy street.
The black town is deformed by a refusal to obey.
Taller than a standing man, wider than a window of hope,
smaller than a heavy piece of history.
Smaller than the regretting souls.
Scorched Earth absorbs a giant sorrow.
Piece by piece, stroke by stroke, deeper and deeper,
a bloody Tulsa is finally remembered.
Mark Bradford, Scorched Earth, 2006
Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, acrylic paint, bleach, and additional mixed media on canvas, 95 1/4 x 118 1/4 x 2 1/4 in. (241.94 x 300.36 x 5.72 cm)