Sanford Biggers’s work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Working with antique quilts that echo rumors of their use as signposts on the Underground Railroad, he engages these legends and contributes to this narrative by drawing and painting directly onto them. In response to ongoing occurrences of police brutality against Black Americans, Biggers’ BAM series is composed of bronze sculptures recast from fragments of wooden African statues that have been anonymized through dipping in wax and then ballistically ‘resculpted’. Following a residency as a 2017 American Academy Fellow in Rome, the artist recently began working in marble. Drawing on and playing with the tradition of working in this medium, Biggers creates hybridized forms that transpose, combine and juxtapose classical and historical subjects to create alternative meanings and produce what he calls “Chimeras”. As creative director and keyboardist, he fronts Moon Medicin, a multimedia concept band that straddles visual art and music with performances staged against a backdrop of curated sound effects and video. Moon Medicin performed at Open Spaces Kansas City in October 2018 and at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. in April 2019.  

Sanford Biggers (b. 1970) was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York City. He was awarded the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2012) and the Brooklyn Museum (2011), among others. His work has been shown in several institutional group exhibitions including at the Menil Collection (2008) and the Tate Modern (2007), and also recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017) and the Barnes Foundation (2017). In 2018, Biggers was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and in 2019 he was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame. Biggers’ work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Center, Minneapolis; the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; and the Legacy Museum, Montgomery, among others.
@sanfordbiggers

Andrea Andersson serves as Founding Director and Chief Curator of Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, a multi-platform organization based in New Orleans. As a writer and curator, she has organized internationally touring exhibitions; she co-edits a series of artists’ books together with Siglio Press including Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, and Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension. She most recently co-edited (with Antonio Sergio Bessa) Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale UP), which accompanies the eponymous co-organized exhibition currently on view at the Bronx Museum of Art and traveling in the spring to the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.
@andreaanderssonrivers

Antonio Sergio Bessa is Chief Curator Emeritus at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, where he organized several exhibitions, including The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop (2019) and Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect (2017, in collaboration with Jessamyn Fiore), and Martin Wong: Human Instamatic (2015, in collaboration with Yasmin Ramirez). Bessa is a scholar of concrete poetry and author of Oyvind Fahlstrom: The Art of Writing. He has also edited several volumes on the subject including Mary Ellen Solt: Towards a Theory of Concrete Poetry (2010), and Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos (2007, in collaboration with Odile Cisneros).