The expansive interdisciplinary practice of Los Angeles-born artist Sanford Biggers spans sculpture, textiles, sound, performance, film, and installation.
Read MoreConcerned with African American histories and contemporary sociopolitical issues, Biggers subverts and problematises narratives embedded in the American collective consciousness through artworks intended as 'objects for a future ethnography'.
Biggers grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended a Methodist church. In the early 1990s, Biggers spent three years living in Japan, where he encountered Buddhism—an experience that would later influence conceptual and stylistic elements in his artistic practice.
Through the 1990s, Biggers studied at Syracuse University in Florence through its International Program, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Maryland Institute of College of Art in Baltimore, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 1999, he graduated with an MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago.
Alongside his art career, Biggers leads the experimental five-piece concept band Moon Medicin, whose multimedia performances incorporate costumes, photo and video installations, political satire, and surrealist funk.
Sanford Biggers is recognised for his sculptures and installations, which subvert the material vernacular of historic modes of making, such as traditional quilts and African sculpture.
Luring in the viewer with their scale and materiality, Biggers' works pick apart existing assumptions, presenting new narrative potential for Black American culture and history. Drawing from a rich range of references—historic African art, classical Greek and Roman sculpture, 20th-century western art history, architecture, political movements, religion, literature, and hip hop culture—Biggers speaks to the contemporary Black American experience through symbolically loaded, conceptually rigorous artworks that cross cultures, ideologies, and eras.
Produced earlier in Biggers' career, Lotus (2007) is a large-scale steel and glass disc in the shape of a stylised flower. At first exuding a sleek minimalism, the images etched onto each petal are revealed to be referencing drawings of a cargo hold on an 18th-century slave vessel, crammed with the densely packed bodies of enslaved people. Like much of the imagery in Biggers' works, this drawing recurs in other formats in the artist's practice.
The distinct 'BAM' series (2015—ongoing) is comprised of various wooden African sculptures purchased from markets, which the artist then dipped in wax and manipulated through gunshots at a shooting range—a process that the artist documents through video. Some of the outcomes were then cast in bronze, such as BAM (for Michael) (2015). Named after victims of police violence, the 'BAM' series melds historic figurative representations of African people with contemporary state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans in an unsettling performative political commentary.
Biggers' later works continue the exploration of the historic and ethnographic associations of figurative sculptures. In The Ascendant (2020), the artist fuses African figurative references with classical European sculpture in a bust rendered in pink Portuguese marble. For the Rockefeller Center, Biggers produced the ambitious outdoor sculpture Oracle (2021), a hybridisation of the Greek god Zeus and an 'Africoid mask-bust figure' in cast bronze, standing 25 feet tall.
Sanford Biggers quilts begun to be made in the 2000s, and the artist has since experimented with the medium extensively, producing painted quilts and deconstructed quilt-based sculptural collages. Viewing the historic tradition as a channel for 'material storytelling', Biggers imbues his quilts with symbolic inferences and art historical references in his distinct improvisational mash-up aesthetic, primarily using antique readymade quilts.
Chorus for Paul Mooney (2017) is a large, square quilt-painting collage that alludes to contemporary abstract painting with bright, gestural strokes of colour, while Reconstruction (2019) features repeated segments of the American flag amongst decorative quilt panels, assembled in a geometric formation in plywood framing.
In recognition of his prolific output of quilt-based works, a major exhibition of nearly 60 quilts was presented at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2020, entitled Codeswitch. The exhibition cemented Biggers' position in a lineage of prominent African American quiltmakers and textile artists, including Faith Ringgold and Sam Gilliam.
In an interview with Jan Garden Castro for Sculpture magazine, Biggers stated: '... It's not just a reference to the readymade. It's about propagating a story and putting these powerful objects back into a contemporary and trans-generational dialogue. Not only that: it's for them, ultimately, to be viewed and reconsidered in the future ... They're palimpsests and repositories of history and culture.'
Over his career, Biggers has received numerous awards and distinctions, and participated in international residencies.
Selected awards and distinctions include the Guggenheim Fellowship (2020); a dedication in America's Black Holocaust Museum (2020); Hall of Fame, New York Foundation for the Arts (2019); Arts and Letters Award in Art, The American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018); Rome Prize in Visual Arts, The American Academy, Rome (2017); Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts, The American Academy, Berlin (2015); The Joyce Foundation Award (2015).
Biggers has undertaken residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (2020); Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida (2016); Arizona State University Art Museum (2015); Georgia Institute of Technology for Africa (2014); Harvard University (2009); and Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2007); among other institutions.
Since 2000, Sanford Biggers has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows worldwide.
Select solo exhibitions include Only the Ashes, Massimo de Carlo Gallery, London (2021); Intersections: Sanford Biggers — Mosaic, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2021); Oracle, Rockefeller Center, New York (2021); Soft Truths, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2020); Codeswitch, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2020); Quadri Ed Angeli, David Castillo Gallery, Miami Beach (2019); Chimeras, Baldwin Gallery, Aspen (2019); New Work, Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago (2018); Sanford Biggers, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018); Falk Visiting Artist, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro (2017).
Select group exhibitions include Annotations & Improvisations, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2021); Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021); AbStranded: Fiber and Abstraction in Contemporary Art, Everson Museum of Art, New York (2021); Break the Mold: New Takes on Traditional Art Making, North Carolina Museum of Art (2021); Craft Front and Center, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2021); The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2021); The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021).
Biggers' work is held in major public collections throughout the United States, including The New Museum, New York; America's Black Holocaust Museum, Milwaukee; The Art Institute of Chicago; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Dallas Museum of Art; Jewish Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Portland Art Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Beyond America, Biggers' work can be found in the collections of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fundação Sindika Dokolo, Angola; and Mémorial ACTe, Guadeloupe.
Sanford Biggers' website can be found here, and his Instagram can be found here.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2021
