Sanford Biggers’ multidisciplinary practice explores the entanglement of American history and his narratives to the current social, political, and economic tensions. Working with antique quilts—many believed to be coded signposts on the Underground Railroad—Biggers layers painting, sculpture, and geometry to reinterpret their formal patterns and symbolic weight. By cutting, reconstructing, and recontextualizing these historical fabrics, he positions himself as a collaborator with the past, honoring its textures while destabilizing linear histories.

In Good for the Gander (2025), Biggers engages the quilt as both medium and message, embedding gold leaf into its surface and transforming it into a dimensional object that challenges the boundaries between craft and fine art. In BAM (For Sandra) (2016), Biggers cast an African sculpture in bronze and filmed it being repeatedly shot at a firing range. The resulting video is played in reverse, with shattered fragments flying back into place on the figure. Named for Sandra Bland, the work memorializes victims of police violence while reflecting on the cyclical and unresolved nature of racial trauma. Like his quilt works, it embodies a gesture of reassembly.