Sanford Biggers is a conceptual artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, sculpture, video, photography, mixed media, music, and performance. His work investigates the complex interplay of narrative, history, and culture. Engaging with both historical and contemporary contexts, Biggers explores the inherent tensions between language and symbol, myth and reality, past and present. His work speaks directly to current social, political, and economic conditions while examining the cultural frameworks and historical legacies that have shaped them.
Positioning himself as an artistic intermediary, Biggers intervenes established narratives and reconfigures familiar symbols and signifiers to challenge assumptions and offer new interpretations of collective mythologies. His practice often involves collaborating with the past, particularly through his ongoing series using antique quilts—objects rumored to have served as coded markers along the Underground Railroad. By drawing, painting, and reconstructing these quilts into two-dimensional compositions and three-dimensional sculptural forms, Biggers engages with historical legend while contributing his own visual language to its ongoing narrative. Throughout his work, Biggers draws from a wide array of influences, including Los Angeles graffiti culture, American folk traditions, African and European sculptural forms, Buddhism, and the obscured margins of history. His recurring visual motifs—pianos, trees, clouds, Cheshire Cat smiles, lotus flowers—function as mutable symbols, their meanings shifting with each new iteration. Through this process of disruption and reassembly, Biggers invites viewers to reconsider the stories we inherit and the ways they are told.
Biggers (b.1970, Los Angeles, CA) received a BA from Morehouse College, Atlanta, and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he sits on the Board of Governors. He was a former Associate Professor at Columbia University's Visual Arts program. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1998). Biggers’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions throughout his career: Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch, an exhibition devoted to the artist’s Codex works and curated by Sergio Bessa and Andrea Andersson, traveled from the Bronx Museum of Art, NY, to the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA from 2020–2022. Other notable solo exhibitions include moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2023), Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Chazen Museum, Madison, WI (2023); Salina Art Center Kansas, Salina, KS (2022); The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. (2021); and The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY (2020). Notable group exhibitions include MFA Houston, TX (2024); Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO (2023-24); Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden, The Netherlands (2023-24); Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2023); Rudolph Tegner Museum, Dronningmølle, Denmark (2022); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (2022); Cleveland Art Museum of Art and Design, Cleveland, OH (2022); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2022); Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum, NY(2021); Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC (2021); Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2021); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2021); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2020). Biggers has produced numerous public installations: his monumental sculpture Oracle has been featured at Rockefeller Center in New York and on the outdoor sculpture pedestal at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; he most recently completed an installation for the Portland International Airport in Portland, OR.
Public collections include The Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Bass Museum, Miami, FL; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum, New York, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Art and Design, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Biggers has received numerous awards and accolades, including the Bronx Museum’s Art and Social Justice Award (2024), Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2024); the 26th Heinz Award for the Arts (2021), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), and a Joyce Foundation Award and NEA Grant (2015) for assisting with a year-long project in Detroit that resulted in Subjective Cosmology, his solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016). He also received the Arts and Letters Award in Art (2018) presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Biggers currently lives and works in New York, NY.