Sanford Biggers

Sanford Biggers (b. 1970, Los Angeles) creates work that is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current happenings while examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often-overlooked aesthetic, cultural, historical, and political narratives through his use of antique quilts and textiles, classical sculptures from around the world, sonic interventions, performances, and video. Biggers describes his process as “conceptual patchworking,” a method of transposing, combining, and juxtaposing ideas, forms, and genres that challenge traditional historiography, provenance, and official narratives to create artworks for a future ethnography.

Biggers draws on a host of disparate influences throughout his practice—from Los Angeles graffiti culture to American folk traditions, Buddhism, African and European sculptural traditions, and the margins of history. From these sources, Biggers has developed a vocabulary of visual motifs that appear frequently throughout his work: pianos, trees, clouds, Cheshire Cat smiles, lotus flowers. In Biggers's hands, these signifiers all become slippery, holding onto multiple meanings, their symbolism altered yet again through each subsequent transmission.

Biggers is preparing for two solo exhibitions in 2026 - one with his New York-based gallery and another with the Parrish Art Museum. Biggers is also preparing to participate in the 2026 Venice Biennale as well as producing 2025 and 2026 shows with his multimedia concept band, Moonmedicin. His studio, well equipped to take on large architectural design projects, is in the midst of several public art and architectural projects across the United States, all going live before 2028.

Through a commission from the Art Production Fund, Biggers presented, Oracle, a monumental bronze sculpture and multimedia public art installation at Rockefeller Center in New York City in 2021. Oracle traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles on March 26, 2023 and was acquired by the Donum Estate and placed on view permanently in 2025. His major public art projects from his Codex series can be seen at the Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon, Woodbine Center in Ontario, and at the MIT List Center in Cambridge, MA. His Unsui series debuted in 2025 with large-scale public projects at Brown University in Providence, RI and at Desert X in Palm Springs, CA. Biggers debuted a 24-foot-wide-by-16-foot-tall multimedia outdoor sculpture that operates as a combination and continuation of Biggers’ Chimera, Shimmer, and Codex series at the grand opening of Orange County Museum of Art. His solo museum exhibition, Codeswitch, a survey of his Codex series of mixed-media paintings and sculptures made with antique quilts was presented at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2020); the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2021); and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY (2022). Beyond these select projects, Biggers’ work has been exhibited internationally and nationally in prestigious institutions, including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Centre of Pompidou Metz, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California African American Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, and Bronx Museum of Art. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors throughout his career, including the Bronx Museum of Art’s Art + Social Justice Award, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Morehouse College’s Bennie Trailblazer Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the 26th Heinz Award for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome, and the deFINE Art Award from Savannah College of Art & Design. He was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design. In addition, he was the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 2021-2022 Visiting Professor and Scholar in the MIT Department of Architecture and served as an Associate Professor of Sculpture and New Genres of Visual Arts at Columbia University from 2009 through 2018.

Biggers is the creative director and keyboardist of the conceptual performance collective Moonmedicin and a recent GRAMMY recipient for his contribution to Meshell Ndegeocello’s The Omnichord Real Book, which was awarded the ”2024 Best Alternative Jazz Album.” Biggers lives and works in New York City.