For nearly two months in 2021, Oracle, a meditative 25-foot-tall bronze sculpture by Sanford Biggers, beckoned passersby to the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center in New York. Presented by the Art Production Fund and Rockefeller Center in partnership with Marianne Boesky Gallery, the temporary installation was paired with an exhibition of Biggers’ multimedia works scattered throughout the landmark complex.
Oracle—slated to grace various cities over the next few years—is an expansion of Biggers’ Chimera sculptures, for which he fuses classic Greco-Roman figures with African and diasporic objects rendered in marble to challenge deeply entrenched cultural narratives.
Biggers’ multidisciplinary oeuvre explores political and social landscapes while bringing oft-overlooked snippets of history to the forefront. Consider Codex, Biggers’ longest-running autonomous project. This series of antique quilts reimagined over two decades as paintings, collages, and sculptures pays homage to the signposts disguised as quilts that helped enslaved Black people find their way to freedom through the Underground Railroad.
An affinity for such layers is undoubtedly shaped by his upbringing. Now based in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, Biggers hails from Los Angeles, where his father was a doctor, and his siblings were also drawn to the sciences. “At the same time, my sister danced, and my brother had a garage band where he played the bass. We were a right brain, left brain combination family,” he recalls.
Vinyl and an electric air pump were used to create Laocoön (Fatal Bert)
The youngest of the brood, Biggers was raised amid the advent of hip-hop in the 1970s and ’80s. “I was immediately swept up into DJing, doing graffiti, and break dancing,” he says. One day, he sneaked out of the house to paint murals, “was busted by the cops, and they put the fear of God in me,” he remembers. Biggers wasn’t arrested, but the very next week those creative stirrings were instead nurtured in the classroom, when he enrolled in his high school’s advanced placement art offerings.
That Biggers so deftly glides between such mediums as painting, sculpture, and music is a testament, he believes, to his early passion for hip-hop and the notion of remixing that is embedded in the genre. Found objects, for example, became central to his compositions. “My artistic journey has been about processing some of the more academic and formal aspects of my art education and then some of the more renegade aspects of it and finding a way to merge all of that,” he explains. “That meld is represented metaphorically by the materials I choose.”
During his time at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Biggers was mentored by sculptor Frank Toby Martin at sister institution Spelman College, also in Atlanta, where he competed against graduate students in sculpture competitions. Studies in Italy followed, as did a formative three-year-long period in Japan, where he dove into origami and ink paintings and designed the interiors of a friend’s cabaret.
That time spent in Asia was also critical to Biggers’ personal growth because he discovered Buddhism there. Strains of the religion’s symbols, he notes, can be seen in his work “in terms of patterns and circles,” including early performances that showcased break dancers performing atop large mandalas. A Buddhist philosophy continues to guide his practice. Biggers recognizes that more quiet experiences like traveling and engaging in conversation, absorbing thoughts that will later manifest in his sketches and writings, are just as valuable to producing art as an active day-into-night session at the studio.
Back in the U.S., Biggers bolstered his education first at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, then by dipping into the worlds of film, video, and sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Soon after, residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA PS1 lured him to New York.
Orpheus combines an antique quilt with assorted textiles and wood
Along with recent exhibitions at the likes of Wasserman Projects in Detroit, Beijing’s MASSIMODECARLO gallery, and the Peter Marino Foundation in Southampton, New York, Biggers has been consumed by Of many waters, his monumental 24-foot-wide-by-16-foot-tall outdoor sculpture for the new Thom Mayne-designed building at the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, California. Pulling from Codex, Chimera, and Shimmer, his range of sequin-bedecked creations, Biggers wanted to “pump up the scale” of those pieces, he says, and unite them “to make something that’s a little bit harder to find, more of an amalgam of all my studio interests.”
Numerous developments are underway too, including one for a new building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the National Black Theatre in Harlem, home of the original Studio Museum. “The viewership for public work is so different from a museum or a gallery,” says Biggers, and he loves seeing his concepts translate to that audience.
He is equally revved about Moon Medicin, the multimedia concept band for which he serves as creative director. With Biggers on keyboard and synthesizer, Moon Medicin has performed within art installations and recently made an album in Detroit at Jack White’s Third Man Pressing record plant. Now, Biggers envisions an even more ambitious future for the band, with intimate concerts taking place under towering sculptures and buoyed by projection mapping on city walls.
Although Moon Medicin turns out a stream of rock, jazz, and funk covers, it also flaunts a “hip-hop and punk mentality,” adds Biggers. It’s reflected in songs like “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem, set to the music of Prince’s 1981 “Controversy” (Moon Medicin’s bass player was in Prince’s band), “because somehow, it’s controversial to have a Black national anthem,” muses Biggers. It all goes back to hip-hop for him, and the “patchworking of ideas and materials to basically talk about the Socratic nature of human existence.”
This article originally appeared in HD’s November 2022 issue.
