Artists

Sanford Biggers is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, video, music, and performance. His work interrogates the intersections of history, narrative, and myth, challenging official accounts and reconfiguring cultural symbols to propose new understandings of the past and present. Biggers often describes his process as “conceptual patchworking,” transposing, combining, and juxtaposing ideas and forms to complicate traditional historiography and imagine new cultural constellations.

His diverse practice incorporates antique quilts rumored to have been coded markers on the Underground Railroad, which he reconstructs into his Codex series; sonic interventions and performances, including his role as creative director and keyboardist of the conceptual collective Moonmedicin; and monumental sculptural works such as Oracle (2021), presented at Rockefeller Center. His recurring motifs—pianos, trees, clouds, lotus flowers, and Cheshire Cat smiles—shift meaning with each appearance, reflecting his commitment to remixing traditions across African, European, American, and folk sources.

Biggers studied at Morehouse College (BA) and received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1998). His work has been featured in major solo exhibitions, including Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Bronx Museum of the Arts; traveled to the Speed Art Museum and the California African American Museum, 2020–22), the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C., 2021), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016). Group exhibitions include the Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Brooklyn Museum, the Menil Collection (Houston), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

His works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, among others.

Biggers has received numerous honors, including the Bronx Museum’s Art and Social Justice Award (2024), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2024), the 26th Heinz Award for the Arts (2021), the Rome Prize (2017), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020). He has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Morehouse College, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame, and served as the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor at MIT (2021–22). In 2024 he received a GRAMMY Award for his contribution to Meshell Ndegeocello’s The Omnichord Real Book, which won Best Alternative Jazz Album.