Sanford Biggers

Massimo De Carlo Pièce Unique is very pleased to present Birdsong, by Sanford Biggers. On this occasion, writer and curator Alayo Akinkugbe wrote the following text to accompany the exhibition.

Weeks ago I ambled alone

through the ancient site of the Acropolis and its eponymous museum

in Athens.

There I saw marble in myriad forms:

carved, mounted, shiny, matte, expansive, miniscule,

in alto and bas-relief, as stand-alone sculpture, but primarily fragmented, broken,

and repaired.

Weeks later, I am contemplating Sanford Biggers’ Tiresias in the presentation, Birdsong.

Tiresias, in Greek mythology, was both blind and clairvoyant,

lived as man and as woman

and had the powers of a soothsayer: interpreting birdsong to predict the future.

Biggers’ Tiresias evokes the ancient and contemporary,

a synthesis which the artist repeatedly deploys in his oeuvre to reconfigure, question and offer alternatives

to how we view that which we conceive of as familiar.

Rosso Cardinale marble is alive, in my eyes,

by comparison to the beige, off-white Pentelic marble

of the ancient sculptures which I saw weeks ago. Should white-ish marble be read,

in accordance with art historical tradition,

as a symbol of purity, sanctity and cleanliness, then Rosso Cardinale is severely polluted. Biggers’ Tiresieas, carved from this stone, is almost visceral;

with burgundy skin and pale veins

pulsing across the sculpture’s surface.

As T.S. Eliot’s Tiresias declares in The Waste Land,

he is ‘throbbing between two lives’.

With a head – hair, lips and eyes – which reminds me of family

(a clay bust of an uncle I never knew)

Biggers’ Tiresias twists my understanding

of the appearance of a Greek mythological figure. I am reminded of the never-ending possibilities that the manipulation of marble can yield;

the various, atypical ways in which

the image of a Greek “god” may be formed.

It is this which lures me repeatedly, deeper

into the practice of Sanford Biggers:

the marriage of the familiar and the unexpected, the layers of meaning and feeling to be unearthed the longer that one spends with the work,

which he offers generously to our interpretation.

—Alayo Akinkugbe

Sanford Biggers (Los Angeles, 1970) lives and works in New York, US.

Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current happenings while examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often-overlooked aesthetic, cultural, historical, and political narratives through his use of antique quilts and textiles, classical sculptures from around the world, sonic interventions, performances, and video. Biggers describes his process as “conceptual patchworking,” a method of transposing, combining, and juxtaposing ideas, forms, and genres that challenge traditional historiography, provenance, and official narratives to create artworks for a future ethnography.

Biggers’ work has been exhibited internationally and nationally in prestigious institutions, including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Centre of Pompidou Metz, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, California African American Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, and Bronx Museum of Art. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors throughout his career, including the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Morehouse College’s Bennie Trailblazer Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the 26th Heinz Award for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome, and the deFINE Art Award from Savannah College of Art & Design. He was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design. In addition, he was the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 2021-2022 Visiting Professor and Scholar in the MIT Department of Architecture and served as an Associate Professor of Sculpture and New Genres of Visual Arts at Columbia University from 2009 through 2018.

As creative director and keyboardist, he fronts moonmedicin, a multimedia concept band that straddles visual arts and music with performances staged against a backdrop of curated sound effects and video. In 2022, Moon Medicin released a new album entitled “Great Escape” with Third Man Records and has performed at venues such as the Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, among others.