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Biggers draws on a host of disparate influences throughout his practice—from Los Angeles graffiti culture to African American folk traditions, Buddhism, African and European sculptural traditions, and the margins of history. From these sources, Biggers has developed a vocabulary of visual motifs that appear frequently throughout his work: pianos, trees, Cheshire Cat smiles, lotus flowers. In Biggers’s hands, these signifiers all become slippery, holding onto multiple meanings, their symbolism altered yet again through each subsequent transmission.
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"Over a decade, Biggers has created a body of work that uses a constellation of recurring signs and objects. His is a developing voice that engages notions of syncretism and indirection as ways to think about ideas of violence, desire, and landscape in the performative and cultural traditions of the African Diaspora and in the global world."
– Kellie Jones, South of Pico
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"It’s very much like history itself, a patchwork of experiences, perspectives, and reportage that attempt to construct a single narrative but these works recognize that history is always subject to time itself, and subsequently unfixed.”
– Sanford Biggers
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"I like to think that we’re somewhere in the midst of a simultaneity. Past, present, and future are not in vacuums. They’re all in relation to each other."
– Sanford Biggers
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"Much has been written about Biggers's expansive, even competing, sources of influence, which include, among others, hip-hop, African spirituality, Japanese Zen Buddhism, West African Vodun, Italian Baroque sculpture, black minstrelsy, sacred geometries, and Afrofuturism. The vastness of his cultural lexicon is coupled, however, with a keen capacity for distillation. Ranging, irreconcilable ideas root into a suite of oft-repeated signs."
– Andrea Andersson, Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch
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ABOUT SANFORD BIGGERS
Biggers’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions throughout his career: Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch, an exhibition devoted to the artist’s Codex works and curated by Sergio Bessa and Andrea Andersson, traveled from the Bronx Museum of Art, NY, to the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA from 2020–2022. Biggers has had additional solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Chazen Museum of Art, WI; and the Brooklyn Museum, NY. His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; and the Tate Modern, London, UK, among others. Biggers has produced numerous public installations: his monumental sculpture Oracle has been featured at Rockefeller Center in New York and on the outdoor sculpture pedestal at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; he most recently completed an installation for the Portland International Airport in Portland, OR.
The Bronx Museum honored Biggers with their Art + Social Justice Award in 2024. In 2023, Biggers received The Amistad Center’s Spirit of Juneteenth Award, Morehouse College’s Bennie Trailblazer Award, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and he was elected to the National Academy of Design. In 2021, Biggers was awarded the 26th Heinz Award for the Arts from the Heinz Family Foundation and named Savannah College of Art and Design's deFINE Art Honoree and the MIT Department of Architecture’s 2021-2022 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor and Scholar. In 2020, Biggers was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2019, he was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame. He was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2018 and the Rome Prize in Visual Arts in 2017. Biggers's work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; the Walker Center, Minneapolis, MN; the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art, TX; and the Legacy Museum, Montgomery, AL, among others. Biggers was raised in Los Angeles, CA; he lives and works in New York, NY.
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SELECTED PRESS
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Artnet News | Artist Sanford Biggers Explains How Our Misunderstandings of Classical Sculpture Inspired His Rockefeller
May 7, 2021BY SARAH CASCONE Sanford Biggers is taking over New York's Rockefeller Center this spring with a campus-wide art installation headlined by Oracle, a monumental bronze sculpture that-standing 25 feet tall... -
The New York Times | Cracking Codes With Sanford Biggers
August 14, 2020BY SIDDHARTHA MITTER “You don’t have to follow the norms,” says this artist who makes wrenching sculptures transformed by gunfire and radically altered heirloom quilts. A studio visit sheds light... -
The New Yorker | The Playful, Political Art of Sanford Biggers
January 18, 2018BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM Three years ago, on a Saturday in spring, I wandered into a humid gallery just south of Canal Street. On display was a group exhibition called “Black... -
The Brooklyn Rail | Sanford Biggers with Yasi Alipour
March 10, 2021INTERVIEW WITH YASI ALIPOUR For so long, I waited for the conversation that follows. I started in Columbia University’s MFA Visual Arts program in 2016. It happened to be when... -
Flaunt | Sanford Biggers / The Interplay Of Narrative And Linguistics In Quilting
February 28, 2023BY JOSHEN MANTAI New York artist Sanford Biggers is a force to be reckoned with, whose list of achievements transcend belief. His work has been marked by improvisation, placing emphasis... -
Forbes | Sanford Biggers Leads Re:mancipation Project At Chazen Art Museum In Madison, Wisconsin
February 22, 2023BY CHADD SCOTT Black freedom as an act of white power. That's the problem. White supremacy. A partially-clothed freedman kneels before an impeccably dressed Abraham Lincoln who 'heroically' breaks the... -
The Art Newspaper | Sanford Biggers unveils monolithic sculpture at Rockefeller Plaza
May 5, 2021BY GABRIELLA ANGELETI A monumental bronze sculpture by the Harlem-based artist Sanford Biggers was unveiled this morning at Rockefeller Center. The work Oracle (2020) continues the artist’s recent Chimera series... -
The St. Louis American | Sanford Biggers Exhibition Features Power Figures Made in Memory of Victims of Police Violence
September 4, 2018BY CHRIS KING Sanford Biggers’ self-titled show that opens at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on Friday, September 7 – the first exhibition here for the New York-based artist –... -
Hyperallergic | Sanford Biggers Summons the Power of Deep Music
October 19, 2017BY SEPH RODNEY Biggers’s current exhibition at Marianne Boesky gallery, Selah, taps into something deeply powerful and ancestral. Sometimes my experience of one piece of art illuminates another. Recently, I... -
Architectural Digest | Sanford Biggers Makes Art Out of Antique Quilts
August 31, 2017BY CARLY OLSON When artist Sanford Biggers arrives at his studio, he never knows what he's going to find on his doorstep. Often, it's a box full of quilts. And,... -
Interview Magazine | Artists at Work: Sanford Biggers
August 16, 2016INTERVIEW WITH HALEY WEISS “There’s no way you can make a huge, inflatable, dying Fat Albert and not expect some people to be offended,” Sanford Biggers tells us. As an... -
Frieze | Travel Through Time and Space with Sanford Biggers
December 3, 2020BY RAHEL ALMA Antique quilts are mounted high on the walls of the Bronx Museum like clan banners in a medieval feasting hall. ‘Freedom Quilts’ such as these were hung...
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PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
21c Museum, Oklahoma City, OK | The Altoids® Curiously Strong Collection, The New Museum, New York, NY | American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY | America’s Black Holocaust Museum, Milwaukee, WI | The Art Institute of Chicago, IL | Asheville Art Museum, NC | Aspen Art Museum, CO | The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL | Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY | Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY | Cantor Arts Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, CA | Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC | Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX | Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR | The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH | Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX | Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY | Fundação Sindika Dokolo, Luanda, Angola | The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN | The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel | Jewish Museum, New York, NY | J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY | The Legacy Museum, Birmingham, AL | Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA | Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN | Mémorial ACTe, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe | Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC | Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY | Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Chicago, IL | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA | Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX | The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY | Nasher Museum, Charlotte, NC | National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. | Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA | Perez Art Museum Miami, FL | Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ | Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR | Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ | Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL | The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY | Syracuse University Art Museum, Syracuse, NY | Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA | Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN | Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, NC | Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
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