CHICAGO: Sanford Biggers

the pasts they brought with them

February 11 - April 2, 2016

Reception: Thursday, February 11, 2016, 5pm to 7:30pm

moniquemeloche

2154 West Division Street

Chicago, IL

From moniquemeloche:

Following Ago, the artist's celebrated 2013 on the wall installation at moniquemeloche, Sanford Biggers will have his first solo exhibition in Chicago. On a large, horizontal, mounted quilt painting, collaged material buckles underneath Biggers's abstracted motifs. With an emphasis placed on materiality, form, collage, and influences ranging from Miriam Schapiro to Frank Stella, the pasts they brought with them will feature this new series of transmogrified quilts alongside bronzed, deconstructed sculptures sourced from street vendors on 125th Street in Harlem. Narrative video works act as accompaniment to each of the sculptures, further elucidating the process Biggers' figurines undergo.

Plans are in the works to present a live performance of Biggers' "Moon Medicin" - an aural and optical experiment conducted by this interdisciplinary artist.  This would be another first for Chicago audiences, who got a taste for Biggers' theatrics through Ghetto Bird Tunic, a sculpture and costume he created for a 2009 performance that was worn by the late Terry Adkins, which was included in The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2015, travels to the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Fall 2016). Biggers is spending a year interacting within Detroit's art and music communities in preparation for a seminal exhibition that continues his practice of broadening our understanding of American history. He is a TED2016 Fellow, a group of 21 world-changers working at the very forefront of their fields, representing 12 countries around the world. Biggers is a 2015 recipient of both The Joyce Award from The Joyce Foundation and the NEA Art Works program, to funnel his research into Subjective Cosmology, a multidisciplinary exhibition created in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, opening Fall 2016. An alumni of The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Biggers was appointed to their Board of Governors in 2015. During Armory Week 2016 (March 3-6, 2016), moniquemeloche will present a 2 person exhibition of works by Biggers and Ebony G. Patterson, in a storefront exhibition space on New York's Lower East Side, located just steps from the New Museum.  Please contact the gallery for more details.  

A fully illustrated digital catalog with an essay by Matt Morris will accompany the exhibition.

Exhibit Link

SYRACUSE: Sanford Biggers

Sanford Biggers: Shuffle & Shake

November 6 – December 27, 2014

Projected onto North Façade of Everson Museum of Art Building, Dusk – 11:00pm, Thursday – Sunday

Artist talk: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 at 6:30pm

EVERSON MUSEUM OF ART

401 Harrison Street

Syracuse, NY

From urbanvideoproject.com:

Urban Video Project (UVP) and parent organization Light Work are pleased to present the exhibition of “Shuffle”(2009) and “Shake” (2011) by celebrated multimedia artist, Sanford Biggers.  This exhibition marks the second major exhibition of “Celestial Navigation: a year into the afro future”, a year-long program of exhibitions and events at Urban Video Project and partner organizations that takes afrofuturism as its point of departure.

About the Work

“Shuffle” and “Shake” form the first two parts of Sanford Bigger’s Odyssean trilogy about the formation and dissolution of identity.

“Shuffle” is about the struggle between our own perception of self vs. others’ projections onto us. “Shuffle” also examines how we matriculate through society, often masking our insecurities, pain, longing and the internal schizophrenia of our id. Original soundtrack composed from the artist’s field recordings made in Indonesia.

“Shake”, the second video of the trilogy, features Ricardo Camillo — a Brazilian-born, Germany-based choreographer, stuntman, clown and DJ — as he walks from the favelas (or shantytowns) of Brazil, to the ocean before finally transforming into an androgynous silver-skinned figure. Though the final imagery is straight out of Afrofuturism, recalling the specific costuming and aesthetics of P-Funk, it is remains extraordinarily human at the same time, referencing the soul searching of Greek mythology.

About the Artist

An LA native working in NYC, Sanford Biggers creates artworks that integrate film, video, installation, sculpture, drawing, original music and performance. He intentionally complicates issues such as hip hop, Buddhism, politics, identity and art history in order to offer new perspectives and associations for established symbols. Through a multi-disciplinary formal process and a syncretic creative approach he makes works that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are conceptual.

The significance of Biggers’ work within contemporary society has been celebrated through solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center and Mass MoCA. He has participated in prestigious residencies and fellowships including: Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California; ARCUS Project Foundation, Ibaraki, Japan; and the Art in General/ Trafo Gallery Eastern European Exchange in Budapest, Hungary. He has been a fellow of the Creative Time Global Residency, the Socrates Sculpture Park Residency, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views AIR Program, the Eyebeam Atelier Teaching Residency, the Studio Museum AIR Program, the P.S. 1 International Studio Program, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency.

Sanford Biggers’ installations, videos, and performances have appeared in venues worldwide including Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, the Whitney Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and the Yerba Bue a Center for the Arts in San Francisco, as well as institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland and Russia. The artist’s works have been included in notable exhibitions such as: Prospect 1 New Orleans Biennial, Illuminations at the Tate Modern, Performa 07 in NY, the Whitney Biennial, and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Bronx Museum.

Biggers has won awards including: the American Academy in Berlin Prize, Greenfield Prize, New York City Art Teachers Association Artist-of-the-Year, Creative Time Travel Grant, Creative Capital Project Grant, New York Percent for the Arts Commission, Art Matters Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Award, the Lambent Fellowship in the Arts, the Pennies From Heaven/ New York Community Trust Award, Tanne Foundation Award, and Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award Grant.

Biggers is Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Visual Arts program and a board member of Sculpture Center, Soho House and the CUE Foundation. He has also taught at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sculpture and Expanded Media program and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s VES Department in 2009.

For more information, go to sanfordbiggers.com.

About ‘Celestial Navigation: a year into the afro future’

“Celestial Navigation”, a year-long program at UVP, will explore the work of major established and emerging artists through an afrofuturist lens, including works by Julien, Sanford Biggers, Xaviera Simmons, Jeanette Ehlers (as part of “The Black Radical Imagination 2014,” curated by Erin Christovale and Amir George), Cristina de Middel and Cauleen Smith. Artist talks, screenings and a panel discussion in spring 2014 will be included in the programming. Partner venues featuring cross-programmed exhibitions include Community Folk Art Center (CFAC) and Light Work (both in Syracuse).

SCREENING: Shuffle, Shake and Shatter by Sanford Biggers / Atlanta, GA / March 28, 2014

Sanford Biggers, still from Shuffle (The Carnival Within), 2009, Two-channel HD color video installation with sound component, 4:47 minutes. Image via blog.art21.org. 

An Africa Atlanta 2014 premiere event!

Friday, March 28, 2014, 8:00pm

Tickets $15

FERST CENTER FOR THE ARTS AT GEORGIA TECH

349 Ferst Drive NW

Atlanta, GA

From the Africa Atlanta web site:

With live music by the band Moon Medicine, multimedia and performance artist Sanford Biggers presents a montage of his three-part film suite Shuffle, Shake and Shatter as part of the Africa Atlanta 2014 celebration. The film follows the Brazilian Ricardo as he navigates German society and the story continues to Sao Paulo and then to West Africa in this exploration of the formation and dissolution of identity.

An LA native working in NYC, Sanford Biggers creates artworks that integrate film, video, installation, sculpture, drawing, original music and performance. He intentionally complicates issues such as hip hop, Buddhism, politics, identity and art history in order to offer new perspectives and associations for established symbols. Through a multi-disciplinary formal process and a syncretic creative approach he makes works that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are conceptual.

Please note: This is a general admission event. Seating is on stage for this performance.

Event link (Africa Atlanta)

Event link (Ferst Center for the Arts)

EAST HAMPTON: Sanford Biggers

Dark Star

July 6 – July 22, 2013

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

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.

Exhibit Link

RICHMOND: Sanford Biggers

Codex

May 23, 2013 – August 4, 2013

ANDERSON GALLERY

Virginia Commonwealth University | School of the Arts

907 ½ West Franklin Street

Richmond, VA

From VCU Arts website:

Sanford Biggers has achieved international prominence over the last decade with a diverse body of work that explores themes of identity, race, American history, and spirituality, often by blending installation and performance. In Codex, his most recently completed project, Biggers continues to probe these themes through another stylistic departure: painting on historical quilts, many of which were gifts to the artist from descendants of slave owners.

In conceiving the quilt works that make up Codex, Biggers was inspired by the Afrofuturist notion of “Harriet Tubman as astronaut,” the renowned abolitionist who led slaves to their freedom guided by the stars. He was also inspired by the use of quilts as signposts along the Underground Railroad, signaling “stations” or safe houses. Biggers knits these multivalent themes together by applying to each quilt a complex system of imagery that includes star maps, dance notations, and the Buddhist lotus flower, whose petals are each formed by the image of a cross-section of a slave ship. Suspended among the quilts, cloud forms made of raw cotton not only refer to the institution of slavery, but also evoke the theme of transcendence, reminding the viewer of the power of the human will to overcome oppression.

Biggers began to develop Codex after receiving the 2010 Greenfield Prize, awarded annually by the Hermitage Artist Retreat and the Greenfield Foundation to a mid-career artist to create new work. “I’ve not exhibited paintings or drawings for 15 years,” noted Biggers when the exhibition premiered at the Ringling Museum last year. “This project brought me back to those roots.” As observed by Matthew McLendon, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, “Codex plays a significant role in the continued maturation of Sanford Biggers’ work. Here we see the artist reconfiguring symbolism he has used before in three-dimensional forms through a return to his earliest form of expression—painting.”

The exhibition at the Anderson Gallery will also feature the artist’s 2004 installation, Calenda (Big Ass Bang!), which humorously plays on the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Patterns of footprints painted on the gallery’s walls and floor, animated by a spinning disco ball, suggest both dance steps and celestial charts. The title Calenda refers to a form of martial arts originating in Africa that traveled with slaves to America, where it may have become a dance with codes concealed in its moves.

This presentation of Codex is made possible with assistance from The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, where it appeared March 30-October 14, 2012.

About the Artist

A Los Angeles native now based in New York, Sanford Biggers creates artworks that integrate film/video, installation, sculpture, drawing, original music, and performance. In the last year alone, his work was featured in solo exhibitions at MASS MoCA, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and New York’s Sculpture Center. His installations, videos, and performances have been included in many notable group exhibitions worldwide, including Prospect.1 New Orleans, Illuminations at the Tate Modern; Whitney Biennial, and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and at institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland, and Russia.

Biggers has received many international residency awards and fellowships, including the American Academy, Berlin, Germany; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California; ARCUS Project Foundation, Ibaraki, Japan; Art in General/Trafo Gallery Eastern European Exchange, Budapest, Hungary; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine. He has been a fellow at the Socrates Sculpture Park, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views AIR Program, Eyebeam Atelier, Studio Museum AIR Program, and P.S. 1 International Studio Program. Other awards include a Creative Time Travel Grant, Creative Capital Project Grant, New York Percent for the Arts Commission, Art Matters Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Award in performance art/multidisciplinary work, Lambent Fellowship in the Arts, Pennies From Heaven/New York Community Trust Award, Tanne Foundation Award, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award, Camille Hanks-Cosby Fellowship, and James Nelson Raymond Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Formerly a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Biggers is currently Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Visual Arts Program. He is also Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at the VCU School of the Arts in Richmond.

Exhibit Link

COVER: Hank Willis Thomas / ARTnews / November 2012

Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Sanford Biggers, Untitled (detail), 2012, digital C-print, dimensions variable, edition of 6. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Hank Willis Thomas Stages a Photo Shoot
Text by Rachel Wolff

How Sanford Biggers came to strike a pose as a two-faced dandy

Excerpt:

“It’s a little bit about blackface and minstrel-sy,” Thomas says. “I couldn’t figure out what the context was, except for Mary Poppins, which was out around the same time. But still, there’s this thing about white men with black covering them. It’s tens of years away from the minstrel era, and it’s only slightly different. Race has always been somewhat about class.”

Thomas wants to build his own take on the subject by combining the two images, riffing on this idea of racial, cultural, and socioeconomic hybridity, and fleshing out the deceptively complex characters embedded in each. He has enlisted fellow artist Sanford Biggers to collaborate and pose.

“I think Sanford’s work has been very much about cultural hybridity,” Thomas says. “He has done stuff with B-boys and hip-hop and Buddhism. He’s frequently engaged with that, and I thought he could be a kind of lens to talk about these issues.”

Biggers quickly got on board. “I think it’s an American knee-jerk response to equate black and white with literally blacks and whites. I want to find a way for it to be more nuanced,” he says. “And, in fact, I think it did that because this photograph and the character in it become more about duality and a more multifaceted being. It’s about the yin and yang, and pathology and moralism, and life and death. And superego. Those types of things. Which are things I’ve really been exploring in my recent work as well.”

Pick up a copy of the November 2012 issue of ARTnews on newsstands now or  read complete story and see more photos here.

Hank Willis Thomas

Sanford Biggers

HOT LINKS: June 17, 2012

Preston Jackson stands next to his sculpture Passages to Freedom which was unveiled June 16, 2012 at the County of Lake College in Waukegan, IL. BlackArtistNews photo. All rights reserved. 

Over the past few days the following news items caught the attention of BlackArtistNews:

New sculpture honors Underground Railroad (Vernon Hills Review)

Artist Preston Jackson's sperm whale makes environmental statement (pjstar.com)

Art Review: Islands Buffeted by Currents of Change - 'Caribbean: Crossroads of the World' Spans 3 Museums (NYTimes.com)

Two Artists Salute a Legacy - 'Slow Fade to Black,' at Celebrate Brooklyn! in Prospect Park (NYTimes.com)

Geri Allen and Carrie Mae Weems team up to salute the legendary legacy of women in jazz (NY Daily News)

Art In Review: Alex Harsley at June Kelly Gallery (NYTimes.com)

Kehinde Wiley's Dilemma: How the Artist Painted Himself Into a Corner With His New Works (ArtInfo.com)

'Nurturing grace': Painter Emmett Wigglesworth champions African diaspora art in Brooklyn (NY Daily News)

Somethin' Suite: Okayplayer Interview w/Artist Sanford Biggers (Okayplayer.com)

Auction Finds: Philadelphia's forgotten artists (Philly.com)

Charles Coleman, the celluloid adventurist (Chicago Reader)

The 10th Annual Chicago African Disapora International Film Festival - June 15-21, 2012

Cultural War Tears Black Race Apart (allAfrica.com)

New mural will draw on Asheville's African-American history (The Asheville Citizen-Times)

SCREENING: The Triptych featuring Sanford Biggers, Wangechi Mutu and Barron Claiborne

Photography by Barron Claiborne

Afro-Punk Pictures in association with Weeksville Heritage Center presents The Triptych Documentary Series

Thursday, May 24, 2012, 7pm

BROOKLYN MUSEUM 

200 Eastern Parkway

Brooklyn, NY

Time/Schedule:

6PM - Heineken Hour

7-8PM -  Screening

8-PM - After-party doors open to screening non-attendees

8-9PM - Post-screening Q&A (screening attendees only)

9-11PM - Music: Special Guest DJ

Afro-punk pictures presents The Triptych, in association with Weeksville Heritage Center. This short-film series (Terrance Nance, Director; Shawn Peters, Director of Photography; and Barron Claiborne, Co-Director) highlights the work of artists Sanford Biggers, Wangechi Mutu, and Barron Claiborne. Live music and a Q&A with the artists will follow the screening. This event is supported by Heineken.

The Triptych is a unique and profound documentary series profiling some of the most outspoken visual artists of our time.Produced by Afro-punk pictures, the documentary is itself a work of art, featuring three intimate 20-minute conversations with three bold and culturally resonant voices in art. Each monologue is a reflection of their life experience, letting the viewer discover how their observations have shaped the art they create.

The first in the series features Sanford Biggers, Wangechi Mutu and Barron Claiborne – contemporaries, luminaries and friends. Spanning the artistic gamut from interdisciplinary to photography and performance, their keen reflections on the world are at once startling and insightful.

Co-visionary, Barron Claiborne joins nascent director Terrence Nance whose new film, The Oversimplification of Her Beauty, premiered at Sundance 2012. Terrence makes art as a means of creating culture.

As a purveyor of the Black experience, Afro-punk is dedicated to supporting and disseminating the work of visual artists that are prevalent in our society.

As space is limited, advance purchase of nonrefundable tickets for general admission and a reserved seat at the screening is recommended via www.museumtix.com. Members receive free admission; please call the Membership Hotline at (718) 501-6326for reservations.

Triptych Facebook

Photography by Barron Claiborne

Film Trailers:

Sanford Biggers

Barron Claiborne

Wangechi Mutu

NEW YORK: Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk -- An Introspective / Brooklyn Museum / September 23, 2011 - January 8, 2012

Sanford Biggers, Blossom, 2007. Steel, Zoopoxy, silk leaves, wood, piano with MIDI system. 

Image via Brooklyn Museum web site.

Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk—An Introspective  

September 23, 2011–January 8, 2012

BROOKLYN MUSEUM 

200 Eastern Parkway

Brooklyn, NY

SPECIAL EVENT: IN CONVERSATION WITH SANFORD BIGGERS
The artist in conversation with Marcus Samuelsson and Mos Def
Thursday, October 13, 2011

In this In focused selection of thirteen pieces, New York–based artist Sanford Biggers challenges and reinterprets symbols and legacies that inform contemporary America. The exhibition is Biggers’ first museum presentation in New York, and it will also mark the Brooklyn debut of Blossom (2007), a large-scale multimedia installation that incorporates references ranging from lynchings to Buddha’s enlightenment under the bodhi tree. Recently acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, Blossom also alludes to the ideologically tinged landscapes of artists such as Alfred Bierstadt and Frederic Church.

Among the other, thematically related pieces is Cheshire (2008), a sculpture that references both the disembodied smile of the eponymous cat and the caricatured grin associated with blackface minstrelsy. Kalimba II (2002), named after an African percussion instrument, incorporates a piano bisected by a wall; a bench invites visitors to sit down and play half of the keyboard, initiating a dialogue/duet with an unseen visitor on the other side of the wall. As with Blossom, Lotus (2007) combines references to Buddhism and to slavery: a lotus etched in glass contains in each petal diagrams of human bodies placed in the cargo hold of an eighteenth-century slave ship. Biggers has been creating installations and performances for more than a decade.

YouTube Video: Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk -- An Introspective 

Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk–An Introspective is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Exhibition Fund, Toby Devan Lewis, the FUNd, the Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia Contemporary Art Exhibition Fund, and other donors.

The accompanying catalogue is supported by the Lambent Foundation and by a Brooklyn Museum publications endowment established by the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Exhibit Link

Sanford Biggers online

MORE Sanford Biggers on BlackArtistNews 

NEW YORK: Sanford Biggers / Cosmic Voodoo Circus / SculptureCenter / September 10 - November 28, 2011

Sanford Biggers, Shake, 2011. HD color video still. © 2011 Sanford Biggers.

Sanford Biggers: Cosmic Voodoo Circus

September 10 - November 28, 2011

SculptureCenter

44-19 Purves Street

Long Island City, NY

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 10th, 5-7pm

SculptureCenter is pleased to announce Cosmic Voodoo Circus, an exhibition of new work by Sanford Biggers commissioned through SculptureCenter's Artist in Residence program. Merging modern and post-modern strategies with vernacular forms, Biggers studies and posits historical and contemporary subjectivity as a fluid and multivalent concept. Cosmic Voodoo Circus is curated by Mary Ceruti, SculptureCenter's Executive Director and Chief Curator, and will be on view September 10 - November 28, 2011. An opening reception will take place Saturday, September 10th, 5-7pm and is open to the public. 

In Cosmic Voodoo Circus, Biggers exploits the carnival aesthetic to address profound issues of identity, the power of objects, as well as spiritual and cultural transmigration. At the center of Biggers' installation is a new video titled Shake, the second part in an odyssean trilogy about the formation and dissolution of identity. Shot in Brazil with a Creative Time travel grant, Shake follows Ricardo Castillo, a Brazilian-born, Germany based, choreographer, clown, stuntman and DJ, through a transformative journey from the ocean through the favelas, to a colonial palace eventually returning to the sea as an androgynous silver-skinned figure. (The first video in the trilogy, Shuffle, will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, beginning September 23, 2011 as part of Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk - an Introspective.) The installation will also feature several new sculptures including an empty trapeze swinging overhead like a pendulum, a suspended sculpture based on a pair of African spirit sculptures constructed from fabrics including seersucker and quilts, and a billboard sized minstrel-like toothy grin, a recurrent image in Biggers' work. 

Sanford Biggers works across disciplines and cultures creating sculpture, video, photography, music and photographs. Incorporating icons and rites ranging from Japanese mandalas and slave quilts to hip hop and YouTube music culture, Biggers' work connects the signifiers and patterns that link African spiritualism, Buddhist sacred rituals, and African-American urban culture. Biggers has been included in several notable exhibitions including Prospect 1/ New Orleans Biennial, Illuminations at the Tate Modern, Performa 07, the Whitney Biennial and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He has also had solo exhibitions at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Grand Arts, Kansas City; Triple Candie, New York; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; and Matrix/University of Berkeley Museum, Berkeley. A solo show will open at Mass MOCA in December 2011. Born in Los Angeles, Biggers currently lives in New York and is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts Department at Columbia University.

SculptureCenter's exhibition program is generously supported by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the Kraus Family Foundation; the A Woodner Fund; the Lambent Foundation Fund of The Tides Foundation, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc., and contributions from our Board of Trustees and many generous individuals. 

Cosmic Voodoo Circus is made possible with the support of Beth Rudin De Woody, Toby D. Lewis Philanthropic Fund of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, and Jeanne and Michael Klein and a grant from the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation.

About SculptureCenter

Founded by artists in 1928, SculptureCenter is a not-for-profit arts institution in Long Island City, NY dedicated to experimental and innovative developments in contemporary sculpture. SculptureCenter commissions new works and presents exhibitions by emerging and established, national and international artists. Our programs identify new talent, explore the conceptual, aesthetic and material concerns of contemporary sculpture, and encourage independent vision.

Source

SculptureCenter online 

Sanford Biggers online

MORE Sanford Biggers on BlackArtistNews

CLIP ART: Sanford Biggers / Martell Cognac advertisement / Circa 2005

This advertisement which featured artist Sanford Biggers was clipped from an old issue of Vibe magazine. The blue scrawling  on the right is actually the artist's signature and was not a part of the original ad layout. 

POST: Studio Museum in Harlem / Things We Love / November 29, 2010

Things We Love   Posted by Dominic Hackley November 29, 2010 3:09 pm

The Undefeated Billboard Project

Sanford Biggers

The Undefeated Billboard Project selects contemporary artists to create an artwork for a large billboard that sits atop the Undefeated store on Los Angeles’ La Brea Boulevard. Sanford Biggers, one of last season’s Harlem Postcard artists, is the most recent artist to be selected. Past artists include Studio Museum alums Gary Simmons and Kehinde Wiley.  I interviewed Sanford about the project and got the inside scoop...

How was the collaboration between you and the Undefeated Billboard Project initiated?

I was in Brasil on another project when I received an email from Sarah Cohen, the curator of the Undefeated Billboard project. She is a collector of my work and we share several mutual friends yet have never met in person. She told me about the project and asked if I had any images that might work. Until then I'd been by the shop several times over the years, but didn't know her connection to it.

Describe the image and tell us your inspiration behind the artwork?

The image is from a 2007 sculpture of a big, red-lipped smile entitled "Cheshire", which refers to both Lewis Carrol’s infamous cat and the iconic grin of blackface minstrelsy. It is exhibited hanging from a tree or the ceiling. The sculpture also plays a starring role in the video "Shuffle" which I shot in Stuttgart, Germany and Salvador do Bahia, Brasil. The teeth and lips of Cheshire light up in random patterns creating a carnival-esque atmosphere.

How does “Cheshire” fit in to your larger body of work?

One tendency in my work takes problematic images and references to US and world history (slavery, blackface, lynching etc), and attempts to transcend their gravity, horror and psychological vestiges. Through visually and conceptually compelling installations, videos and performances, I challenge our traditional reading of history. Cheshire is a direct example of this approach.

What was the level of involvement of Undefeated’s creative team with this project?

The creative team was quite open, supplying me only with site and printing specs. We all agreed immediately on the best image for the project.

Do you have a particular affinity for sneakers or interest in sneaker design?

I'm a b-boy from back in the day. I don't rock sneaks like I used to but stay up on the latest designs and names.

http://www.studiomuseum.org/studio-blog/checkout/things-we-love/the-undefeated-billboard-project-sanford-biggers