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Home • Art


ARTIST SANFORD BIGGERS PROVIDES SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL AWARENESS WITH ‘BACK TO
THE STARS’

On display at Chicago’s Monique Meloche Gallery, this new exhibition contains
works from Biggers’ Chimera and Codex series; highlighting figurative marble
sculptures and quilt compositions.

Photo Credit: Gioncarlo Valentine
By Okla Jones · Updated October 20, 2023


Sanford Biggers is telling a powerful story with Back To The Stars. Currently
housed at Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago, this new exhibition highlights the
artist’s marble sculptures and quilt compositions, while creating a larger
understanding of material culture.

Showcasing works from his ever-evolving Chimera and Codex series, Biggers’ show
brings together compositions with familiar concepts while exploring new
territory at the same time. By revisiting materials charged with references to
his own career and art history, Sanford encourages his medium to take center
stage while rejecting fixed narratives of quilt and marble traditions. Similar
to his artistic practice, the materials that Sanford incorporates in Back To The
Stars is more than meets the eye. 

“I use mostly found, donated, traded quilts, preferably from pre-1900, but a
whole gamut,” he tells ESSENCE. “But I also do collages and textile pattern
collage works on paper from the quilts. So there’s a whole lot of other
applications for the patchwork of the quilts and various fabrics.”

For this 2017 Rome Prize recipient’s new show, duality can also be described as
one of its themes. Here, Biggers asks the viewer to examine the connection
between the masculine and feminine, durable and delicate, eternal and ephemeral;
while using his art testament to embrace the balance of life, regardless of its
uncertainty. The combination of the artist’s Chimera sculptures, and the
kaleidoscopic Codex series, serve as a revelation of how important it is to
celebrate, as well as examine the people, places, and materials that precedes us
all.



Additionally, Sanford has an exciting outdoor installation that can be seen at
The Newark Museum of Art on October 20. Apollo (Diptych) features two 3-foot
black and white marble sculptures mounted on bronze plinths. Both sculptures
depict a unique interpretation of the Classical Greek god Apollo wearing a large
mask derived from African sources.

As for Back To The Stars, Biggers hopes that viewers build from their own
perspective when looking at the work. “When one sees this, they sort of have to
create more of a story, more of a sense of trying to place where these things
might have come from or what culture they may have come from,” he says.

“It makes them do a little bit more work, but at the same time, it’s forms, I
think, and ideas and formats that people have seen at some points in their life,
but maybe not combined in this way.” Biggers continues. “I think it was a way of
just exploring and seeing how the forms themselves and the materials could
express an idea more so than having an exact thing that I want each of you to
get from it.”

ESSENCE: This is your fourth solo exhibition at Monique Meloche. Can you tell me
what is so significant about this gallery that you continue to showcase your
work here, and how did that relationship develop?



Sanford Biggers: Well, Monique and I go back to when I lived in Chicago during
graduate school, and I think the first one was around close to 10 years ago now,
and it was a window project and we had a couple of shows, and we just have a
long-standing relationship. It’s a place where I like to try new things out,
introduce new bodies of work.

So just even going back to your earlier work, I want to know from your
perspective, why do you think that negative experiences or moments of trauma
seem to produce the best and most resonant works of art?

I mean, I think they have their place, but I think there’s also a host of other
emotions and feelings that create great work as well. I think there’s joy, I
think there’s curiosity, generosity, experimentation, improvisation. I think all
those things are there and I think they all feed each other.

As far as your work goes, when you’re purchasing or receiving these quilts, how
do you know which ones you’re going to keep, and what are you seeing when you’re
searching for fabric?



I’ve gone through different phases. I’ve had times where I just sort of use
whatever I can get my hands on, and part of that was just because I couldn’t get
much at a certain time. And the other thing is just trying to figure out and
learn how to work within these very sort of complicated, ready-made pieces.
Because each fabric works very differently than the next one, obviously. If you
have hundreds of different fabrics on any given quilt and the older they are,
they react differently to different agents and things you use. So a lot of that
was experimentation.

I think I’ve gone through phases where I like a certain type of quilt or certain
type of surface quality, stitching, depth of the batting, different qualities.
Sometimes they feel sculptural, sometimes they feel like paper or just cloth
with nothing behind it.


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With you being a musician as well – when you’re creating, do you see any
parallels between making music and constructing these works of art that you do?

Yeah, one of them is, I think at a certain point with both of them, you sort of
have to try to trust the creative process. You can’t control it all. So I think
that’s an important thing. And also, which is harder to describe, is sort of a
feeling of when you’re in that creative space that it doesn’t really matter if
it is a sculpture or a painting or playing with a band. It’s all sort of a
creative energy that it’s a generative force.



In reading a previous conversation you had with the New York Times, a journalist
wrote about a story saying that slaves communicated through quilts during the
Underground Railroad, and that story may not be completely accurate. You
responded by saying that “It’s more important that the story endures.” So in
terms of your work, how much research do you do historically before you create a
piece?

I do a lot of research historically, so much so that I know that one person is
probably not going to get everything from one particular piece because there’s
so many different references that I’m familiar with. But they are very
idiosyncratic, you know what I mean? So different people get different things,
they see different things, and that’s totally fine.

The pieces that I’m making are in a way historical, now the references are sort
of there, but none of the mass or the figures or I think it goes into a
different space. You know what I mean? So what you’re left behind with is sort
of the aura of that history. And I find the more research I do, the further back
you go with specific objects from antiquity, whether it be textiles or marble or
bronze sculptures, there’s a point where they say, “We don’t know exactly who
made it. We don’t know exactly what year, but we narrow it down to a small
area.” So I mean, I think that’s the same point you get to with the quilts. So
the fact that people say that it’s not true and it lives in vernacular history,
on some level, is pretty similar to what you hear about other things through
antiquity once you get to a certain point.

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