Sanford Biggers


Sanford Biggers is a Harlem-based interdisciplinary artist who works in film/video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance. An L.A. native, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1999.

Life and education

Biggers was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, California. He received a BA from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1998. Biggers says that due to a lack of art major classes at Morehouse, he was required to take the majority of his classes at the all-women Spelman College.

Work

Biggers first received critical attention when his collaborative work with David Ellis, Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II, was included in the exhibition "Freestyle", curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001. Since, his works have been presented internationally including the Tate Modern in London, the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Prospect 1 in New Orleans and the Whitney Biennial, the Kitchen and Performa 07 in New York. Biggers's art frequently references African-American ethnography, hip hop music, Buddhism, African spirituality, Indo-European Vodoun, jazz, Afrofuturism, urban culture and icons from Americana. He claims to place "no hierarchy on chronology, references or media" and his work has been characterized by meditation and improvisation. He says his themes are "meant to broaden and complicate our read on American history." He also uses syncretism to highlight the interconnectedness of seemly disparate cultural practices. In order to make the viewer an active element, Biggers often turns his sculptures into performances.
Having spent most of his life playing piano, this performative element frequently takes the form of music. He has collaborated on music projects with Saul Williams a.k.a. Niggy Tardust, Esthero, Martin Luther McCoy, Imani Uzuri, Rich Medina, and Jahi Sundance.
In 2014, Biggers departed from his typical medium by painting on quilts that were given to him by the descendants of slave owners.
Biggers is Affiliate Faculty at the Virginia Commonwealth University Sculpture and Expanded Media program and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University's VES Department in 2009.
He was previously an Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Visual Arts program.

Recognition

In 2019, Biggers was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame. In 2010, Biggers was awarded the Greenfield Prize at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, a two-year residency and commission of new work. The commission formed the centerpiece of Sanford Biggers: Codex, a 2012 solo exhibition at the Ringling Museum curated by Matthew McLendon.
In 2009 he received the William H. Johnson Prize and was one of the three finalists for the inaugural Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts, the largest juried prize in the world to go to an individual visual artist. Biggers in 2008 received the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Visual Arts. Biggers was an Eyebeam artist-in-residence in 2000.
in 2018 Biggers was interviewed by Vinson Cunningham, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, about his impact on contemporary political art and his role in the Black Lives Matter movement.
Also in 2018 Biggers was given an art award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Exhibitions

Source unless otherwise noted:

Solo

"Sanford Biggers" - Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri. September 7 - December 30, 2018