Sanford Biggers’s work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Working with antique quilts that echo rumors of their use as signposts on the Underground Railroad, he engages these legends and contributes to this narrative by drawing and painting directly onto them. In response to ongoing occurrences of police brutality against Black Americans, Biggers’s 'BAM' series is composed of bronze sculptures recast from fragments of wooden African statues that have been anonymized through dipping in wax and then ballistically ‘resculpted.' Following a residency as a 2017 American Academy Fellow in Rome, the artist recently began working in marble. Drawing on and playing with the tradition of working in this medium, Biggers creates hybridized forms that transpose, combine and juxtapose classical and historical subjects to create alternative meanings and produce what he calls 'Chimeras.' As creative director and keyboardist, he fronts Moon Medicin, a multimedia concept band that straddles visual art and music with performances staged against a backdrop of curated sound effects and video.

In 2009, the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, PA commissioned Biggers to research stories of the Underground Railroad in the area, and it was his first artistic turn to the symbols and encoded messages within quilts. In Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale University Press, 2020), Antonio Sergio Bessa formally draws connections to Robert Rauschenberg's combines and to Sigmar Polke's commercial textile paintings, as well as to early Modernist bricolage, and situates Biggers as a post-Modern, post-war artist exploring tradition and stories — including those of violence, exclusion or expulsion – through material and mark-making.

Within 'whence/wince' (2020), quilts from the 1930s and 1940s incorporate the LeMoyne pointed star, a common signifier for the North Star in Underground Railroad signposts. The quilt depicts four splayed pillars of the Athenian Parthenon in red, white and blue patterning, a stand-in for American democracy and a nod to its earliest model; the pillars are here shown flaccid, cut and collaged, and perhaps prostrate.

The artwork was shown in his solo exhibition 'Soft Truths' at Marianne Boesky Gallery in 2020 alongside his marble 'Chimera' sculptural series which were inspired by Biggers's time in Rome at the American Academy, and investigated further through his 2020 award of the Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The investigation into the Classical is mirrored in the depiction of the Athenian Acropolis in 'whence/wince.'