Sanford Biggers

Born 1970 in Los Angeles/CA, lives and works in Cambridge/MA and New York

www.sanfordbiggers.com




Spanning sculpture, installation, performance, and video, Sanford Biggers’s work is marked by jarring, yet apt and compelling combinations and juxtapositions. He is at home in and energized by black urban culture, and he both accesses and startlingly transforms America’s fraught, racially charged history, including blatantly racist symbols. He is also deeply familiar with Japanese and other Asian cultures, and he is especially attentive to Buddhist thought and aesthetics. Often, these two seemingly antithetical milieus fuse in unprecedented works that make surprising connections across cultures and eras. Biggers’s Lotus (2007), made of hand etched glass surrounded by a steel hoop, is at first glance a lovely and meditative rendition of a lotus flower, prized in the Buddhist tradition as a spiritual symbol. On closer inspection, you see that its intricate glass leaves are etched and decorated with a pattern based on a drawing of an eighteenth- century slave ship carrying its human cargo.

For Carnival Within, Biggers’s grinning aerial sculpture Cheshire (2007) has the bright lights and vivid colors of a carnival sign: you could easily imagine it outside a raucous attraction on an amusement park’s midway. It is based on caricatures of black people in nineteenth-century advertisements for minstrel shows, for instance perpetually grinning with bulbous, bright red lips, and this is one of many times when Biggers appropriates and utterly transforms notoriously racist stereotypes. Cheshire also alludes to the philosophically minded, parable-spouting Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, who disappears leaving only its disembodied smile behind. Shuffle (2009), Biggers’s new video installation, prominently features a costumed black man who is alternately free-spirited and rambunctious, and bound to a tree with rope - perhaps a reference to both the Buddhist Tree of Life and horrific lynchings. While Biggers’s work involves a fierce critique of racist tropes and images, it deftly fuses a myriad of both contemporary and historical references, and does so with humor, blazing anger, eccentricity, and breathtaking freedom.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2008–09: Prospect .1, New Orleans International Biennial, New Orleans/LA
2007: Illuminations, Tate Modern, London
2002: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Bibliography:
Elizabeth Schambelan, “Being There,” in Artforum, January 2009
Maura Egan, “Southern Exposure,” in The New York Times Magazine, December 7, 2008
Jeff Chang (ed.), Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, New York 2007
Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, “Sanford Biggers: Blossom,” in grandarts.com, September/October 2007