Saturday, July 6, 2013

EAST HAMPTON: Sanford Biggers


Dark Star
July 6 – July 22, 2013

4 Newtown Lane
East Hampton, NY

Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce, Dark Star, an exhibition of new works by Sanford Biggers. An internationally acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist, Biggers’ oeuvre often involves site-specific installations, paintings, photography, or musical performances, which explore American heritage and Afrodiasporic experiences. By incorporating dreamlike elements into his pieces, Biggers investigates the dialogue between traditional history and the magical realism of a past revisited from a contemporary landscape.

A recent body of Biggers’ work has reflected on the journey of the American slave traveling the Underground Railroad through the deconstruction and repurposing of old quilts. It is rumored that quilts were used to communicate information about how to escape to free states. Dark Star is a continuation of this ongoing series, pairing the quilt drawings with new works such as sculptures and cloud-shaped light boxes. This new collection plays with the fluid boundaries between craft and fine art, improvisation and logic, defacement and embellishment, and academia and oral history. Biggers’ use of ancient sacred geometry, manipulated contemporary symbols and invented iconography tests the limits of signs—sometimes finding transcendence within the most shameful marks of our past.

Sanford Biggers earned his B.A. from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA, and his M.F.A. from The Art Institute of Chicago, IL. He was recipient of a Creative Time Global Residency grant and served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s VES Department in 2009. Biggers was the first visual art recipient of the Greenfield Prize. He is a member of the faculty of Columbia University and he is an affiliate at the faculty at the Virginia Commonwealth University.

Eric Firestone Gallery, established in New York in 2010, focuses on bringing contemporary and historic art, new genres and popular culture to the public. Eric Firestone Gallery represents a number of artists and estates and such projects as The Boneyard Project and Return Trip have garnered worldwide recognition. The gallery has been featured in Art in America, Bomb, Artnews, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, GQ, New York Magazine, Hampton’s Magazine, Newsday and many other publications and websites.





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