Mark Bradford is considered one of the most critically acclaimed artists of the latest generation. Unlike other African American artists who have favored a return to figurative language, Bradford has remained faithful to abstraction, creating paintings in which collage (in a process of applying superimposed layers of pigmented paper glued to canvas and then deliberately scratched and deteriorated) largely replaces painting. His work focuses on themes of racial denunciation and sexual identity, with the "Merchant posters" being one of his best-known series to which these six prints belong. Three other pieces are held in the collection: a photograph "Ark in the Snow" (2008), a graphic work "Untitled" (2012) that exemplifies his abstract pictorial style, and a sculpture "The once and future king" (2011) that can be described as a portrait of power on the brink of failure and as a metaphor for art itself.