He grew up in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, where his adoptive mother ran a boarding house filled with foster children and traveling musicians. Among those who passed through were Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. This meeting instilled in Bradley an early appreciation for jazz music. He attended the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit and moved to New York in the 1960s. He worked in the installation department at the Guggenheim Museum and then as an art handler at Perls Gallery. A painter himself, he was familiar with the language of the medium, which allowed him to shift into in sales. He eventually served as the gallery’s associate director, during which time he traveled in Europe and met art world figures such as artist Alexander Calder. He also crossed paths with dealer André Emmerich, who presented the first solo exhibition of Bradley’s work at his eponymous gallery, in 1972.

In 1971, the Whitney Museum of American Art invited Bradley to participate in an exhibition on contemporary Black art in the United States but he declined to participate due to its reductionist terms. Instead, he collaborated with philanthropist-collector John de Menil to organize an exhibition in Houston’s Fifth Ward, a predominantly Black neighborhood. The resulting exhibition, The DeLuxe Show (1971), is credited as the first racially integrated exhibition in the United States. It featured artusts such as Richard Hunt, Larry Poons, and William T. Williams. In the 1980s, as he continued to develop his practice, he spent time in South Africa working on sculpture. Despite his initial rise to prominence in the 1970s, he spent over two decades out of the spotlight, during which time he taught and painted houses to support his practice. He experienced renewed interest in his work in the late 2010s. Bradley says: “Sound, to me, created color and light. The thing that interests me the most is how color dictates sound, feelings, the whole bit, it's all there. It's all color.”[1]

Bradley studied at the Yale School of Art and Society of Arts and Crafts. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1983); Pollock Krasner Award (1994, 2002); and Wheeler Foundation Grant (2001). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Museum of Modern Art. Bradley’s work first entered the Studio Museum permanent collection in 2001.