Biggers, Sanford | Artist Overview

Fusing forms found in classical sculpture with those drawn from traditional African masks and figures, Biggers examines historical depictions of the body—and their associated myths, narratives, and power dynamics. Engaging critically with the literal white-washing of Greco-Roman sculpture and black-washing of African sculpture, Biggers reveals erasures of history and origin—and the cultural misinterpretations that follow.With the Chimera sculptures, Biggers challenges the embedded cultural and aesthetic assumptions of his source material while acknowledging the ambiguous origins of the forms from which he borrows. For Biggers, the profound flaws in contemporary understanding of these forms offer an opening to remix them. “You have a white-washed version of European objects and a black-washed version of African objects,” he says. “Editing, cutting and pasting, chopping and screwing has been happening the entire time.”

Biggers engages explicitly with an interplay of history, narrative, and perspective in his Shimmer series. To create these works, Biggers carves a small figural group inspired by African sculpture and situates them on the gallery floor so that they seem to cast a tall shadow of recognizable, sequin-coated figures on the wall. With Overstood (2017), the figural group cast on the wall is in fact Ben Stewart, George Murray, Bobby Seale, and an unnamed observer at a press conference in Oakland, California on November 21, 1968 during the longest and most violent student-lead protest in American history—a protest that culminated in the establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University in 1969. Biggers’s shadowed figures serve as a reminder that the pursuit of social justice and equality remains just as relevant today as it was fifty years ago—and in all the years prior.

Biggers’s  work often translates to a monumental scale for outdoor, public installations. A twenty-five-foot-tall version of Oracle (2021)—from the artist’s Chimera series—was on view at Rockefeller Center in New York in 2021 and is currently on view as  the inaugural installation for the Hammer Museum at UCLA’s outdoor sculptural pedestal. A smaller, bronze version of Oracle is on view at MAG Rochester’s Centennial Sculpture Park. Of many waters... (2022)—which combines elements of Biggers’s Chimera, Codex, and Shimmer series—was commissioned for the opening of the new Orange County Museum of Art in 2022. Just Us (2018) was presented as a mural at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans in 2021 and as part of the ForFreedoms billboard campaign in Charleston, WV in 2018.