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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