Sanford Biggers

Born:
1950
Residence:
New York, New York, USA
Nationality:
American
Trust:
APT New York
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PRESS & PUBLICATIONS

  • Our selection of 10 shows set to make art world headlines — from Dubuffet in London, to Motherwell and Cragg in New York

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  • Moniquemeloche will be participating in Expo Chicago 2017 at Chicago's Navy Pier.

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  • David Castillo Gallery will be participating in the Expo Chicago 2017 at Chicago's Navy Pier.

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  • From an exceptional gift of Australian Aboriginal art in New York, to highlights from Impressionist favorites in São Paulo — our pick of this week's must-see shows

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  • New York, New York, is the city so nice it got two of everything: two baseball teams, two decrepit airports and now two riverside art galleries designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano.

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  • The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York will present a new triennial of contemporary art, called “Uptown,” this summer. “Uptown,” which runs from June 2 through August 20...

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  • ProjectArt, an organization that holds after-school art classes for young people at public libraries in low-income neighborhoods in New York City, Detroit, and Miami, is hosting a benefit auction at Red Bull Arts New York on April 28.

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  • The American Academy in Rome has announced the recipients of its annual Rome prize, which supports innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities through fellowships at its eleven-acre campus in Rome.

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  • Sex trafficking and an art exhibition may seem like an incongruous pairing.

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  • The Armory Show opened to the public yesterday at Pier 92 & 94 in New York.

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  • Artists respond to the new global order with works that range from amusing to acidic.

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  • Using vintage textiles, Sanford Biggers bases Supposition off of an African sculpture in his personal collection, Moniquemeloche gallery director Aniko Berman explains to The Creators Project. “Particularly when it comes to the Underground Railroad, quilts were often used to convey messages or show places for safe passage. He’s very much interested in the cultural coding of textiles,” Berman says.

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  • African-American art and artists have been an important piece of Detroit's cultural identity at least since the middle of the 20th Century, but often the work and the artists who make it have been overlooked — hidden in plain sight. In retrospect, 2016 has the look of a year in which the profile of African-American art in Detroit reached a new level of public consciousness.

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  • Well, we’re here. With 2016 finally coming to a close, the art world has landed in Miami for another Art Basel bacchanal. But along with the carefree glamour of the galas and the private parties, trepidation hangs in the air—whether it’s acknowledged or not. With rising tides, both symbolic and real, increasingly threatening the art world’s private paradise, we are caught between anxiety and blissful disbelief, ruefully letting the champagne flow every December, until, one year, we might be waiting on Collins Avenue for our Ubers in waist-high water. Here is some art to see in Miami that reflects our anxious times, and the promise that we may overcome them.

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  • The 22nd annual ARTWALK NY, benefiting the Coalition for the Homeless, was held on Thursday, November 3, 2016 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan—raising roughly $750,000 for the cause.

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  • The University of Virginia announced today that Matthew McLendon has been appointed director and chief curator of The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia.

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  • NADA New York Moves to March:Starting Next year, the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), will move its New York fair from the first week of May, the time it has been held since it first started in 2012, to the first week of March, coinciding with the Armory Show.

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  • Art Basel today announced the gallery list for its 2016 show in Miami Beach, comprising 269 leading international galleries, drawn from 29 countries across North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

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  • Despite talk of an art market slump and concerns over Zika virus, the show will go on.

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  • Expo Chicago, that city’s annual contemporary art fair, announced the list of participants for its 2016 editions of In/Situ, In/Situ Outside, and Expo Projects.

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  • 10 Exhibitions Opening This Week

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  • This spring, Africa arrives in New York. The city will be treated to an unprecedented opportunity to observe and experience a wide range of contemporary art from Africa and the Diaspora, sparked by the Armory Show’s focus on the region. Satellite fairs, performances, pop-up shows, museum and gallery exhibitions featuring contemporary African artists are also coming into focus around the city—from one-time-only platforms to home-grown institutions that have consistently engaged with African and Diasporan perspectives.

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  • “There is a palpable buzz in the air around EXPO this year,” gallery owner Monique Meloche reported in the run-up to the fourth edition of EXPO CHICAGO, The International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art, which takes place on Navy Pier, September 17-20, 2015. EXPO CHICAGO is still a young fair by any account, but within just four years has managed to establish itself as a prominent contender within the international art fair circuit, and has catalyzed the art community of Chicago behind it. Together with the fair, Chicago’s galleries, institutions, schools, and artists join together for a knockout week in September.

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  • Sanford Biggers will join the new class of Fellows for TED2016,  in Vancouver.

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  • Music can wither in galleries, but this astonishing show demonstrates the cultural and political importance of jazz in dazzling and inspiring style.

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  • Go West? This ambitious art project did. The Los Angeles Nomadic Division’s Manifest Destiny Billboard Project has reached its final destination in Los Angeles after a 2,722-mile journey west from Fort Lauderdale.

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  • "Constructed Histories," the new exhibit at the David B. Smith Gallery downtown, is as good as any contemporary show you might see at the Denver Art Museum these days. Maybe even better, considering the circumstances.

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  • Late in January, 10 billboards by artist Daniel Small went up around the border town of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Each showed a different line of strange lettering resembling Greek and Paleo-Hebrew characters, along with modern red proofreading marks, against an unruly desert landscape.

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  • 10 Opening Exhibitions to Watch

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BIOGRAPHY

Sanford Biggers (b. 1970 Los Angeles) received a BA from Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1992, studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, in 1997 and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. Selected exhibitions include Grains of Emptiness, Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2011); Moon Medicine a solo show at the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, Calif. (2010); Prospect 1: US Biennial in New Orleans (2008); NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith at the Menil Collection in Houston Texas (2008)); Illuminations at Tate Modern in London (2008); The New Authentics at Spertus Museum in Chicago (2008); Museum of Okinawan Time at the Okinawan Prefectural Museum of Art in Naha, Japan (2007); The Somethin' Suite, curated by RoseLee Goldberg at Performa 07 in New York (2007); For Love of the Game at the Amistad Museum/Wadsworth Antheneum in Hartford, Connecticut (2007); and Blossom at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri (2007). In 2011 Biggers will have a solo survey of his work at the Brooklyn Museum and a major installation at Mass. MoCA. Biggers is an 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 is presently assistant professor at Columbia University’s Visual Arts program.

Working in two-dimensions, sculpture, installations, video art and performance, Sanford Biggers has put his mark on the conversation of identity and otherness. He intentionally complicates issues such as hip hop, Buddhism, politics and identity in order to offer new perspectives on the themes and art history itself. Biggers explores creative syncretism or the fusion of different belief systems and the part of humanity that creates a need to have things explained. Music is essential to Biggers’ work because it is an aspect of art that doesn’t need explanation. It is something that exists and makes sense without explanation. Through his art and music, Biggers touches on what it means to exist in a world where you feel different. His work draws upon the historical experiences of African-Americans, but doesn’t rest at reflecting the past. Biggers’ work also projects hopeful possibilities.


For additional information about this artist, visit Mutual Art