His works are made out of layers of paper and cords which he carves into using various tools and techniques, including gouging, tearing, shredding, gluing, power-washing, and sanding.

According to critic Sebastian Smee, “The posters advertised cheap transitional housing, foreclosure prevention, food assistance, debt relief, wigs, jobs, DNA-derived paternity testing, gun shows and quick cash, as well as legal advice for immigrants, child custody and divorce.”[10] Bradford sometimes incorporates ideas of masculinity and gender in his work, drawing on his experiences as a gay man.

Created by the cumulative and subtractive processes of collage and décollage, layered with paint, Orbit appears as an aerial view of a contorting, mutating, and decaying city whose tiny, intricate street grids can no longer maintain their structural integrity.

The image recalls Basquiat's iconographies of black sports heroes, but Bradford's treatment is far more ambivalent; after all, is the dream connoted by the basketball a beacon of hope or a false promise of the easiest exit from the inner city?

According to Maxwell Heller in The Brooklyn Rail, it calls to mind the charred and shattered windshields of cars burned in riots—black, webbed with streaks of light, sleek.

[17] That same year, he created an installation inspired by Hurricane Katrina on the Steve Turner Contemporary Gallery roof, across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

[19] In 2012, Bradford narrated the soundtrack to the 30-minute, site-specific dance duet Framework by choreographer Benjamin Millepied in conjunction with the show The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

[26] In November 2017, Bradford presented Pickett's Charge, a monumental cyclorama of paintings commissioned by the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

[28] Featuring fragments and full articles of the US Constitution, the large painting is made out of 32 separate canvases that occupy an entire wall in the atrium of the embassy.

Entitled "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT," the 195-foot-tall work is the tallest structure on the campus and takes the powerful influence of technology on communication as its point of departure.

[30] For one day only in August 2013, Project Hermés, a work by Mark Bradford installed in a private home in La Jolla, California, opened to the public before the building was eventually demolished.

Titled Process Collettivo, the Rio Terà dei Pensieri/Bradford collaboration aims to launch a sustainable long-term program that brings awareness to both the penal system and the success of the social cooperative model.

[33] In October 2018, Bradford featured an image of Here, a mixed media on canvas work, on the Order of Service for Princess Eugenie of York's wedding to Jack Brooksbank.

[34] In advance of the inaugural Los Angeles edition of the Frieze Art Fair in January 2019, it was announced that Bradford had created a unique image of a police body camera entitled "Life Size."

Proceeds from sales of this limited-edition print series went directly to Agnes Gund's Art for Justice Fund to help support greater career opportunities for people transitioning back home from prison.

The billboards featured images of Mr. LaMarr, a popular hairdresser in 1970s and 80s St. Louis and a close associate of Bradford’s longtime friend, Cleo Hill-Jackson.

[41] Bradford, DiCastro, and Norton are long-term residents of South Los Angeles and have witnessed first-hand how a lack of educational and social resources can affect the community.

[43] In 2001, Thelma Golden included Bradford's hairdressing end-paper collages Enter and Exit the New Negro (2000)[44] and 'Dreadlocks Can't tell me shit' (2000) in the breakthrough 'Freestyle' exhibition of 28 African American artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

This 100-feet-long mural consisted of 300 individual works mounted on plywood, each measuring 22 by 28 inches, and which remained in situ at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University for a year.

As part of the exhibition, Bradford collaborated with children and staff from the Greenmount West Community Center to silkscreen merchandise on sale in a permanent pop-up shop in the museum.

The exhibition featured a new, site-specific sculpture, “Float,” in response to the museum's architecture and a series of large-scale paintings about the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965.

[59] Also in 2020, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth mounted a survey exhibition featuring a large selection of Bradford’s earliest paintings, created from endpapers.

The exhibition consisted of an installation of globe sculptures, a two-part site-specific wall painting, and 16 works on canvas based on Martin Waldseemüller’s map from 1507, the first to use the name ‘America.’[62] In November 2021, Bradford opened ‘Agora,’ curated by Philippe Vergne, at the Fundação de Serralves.