ExhibitionBAM! Sanford Biggers at the Chazen

Exhibition Overview

Sanford Biggers uses a wide range of media—including painting, sculpture, video, film, multi-component installations, and performance—to encourage meaningful dialogue around narratives in American history. Works at the Chazen exhibition include sculpture from the BAM series, video installation, and textile collage featuring antique quilts.

For his BAM! series Biggers draws from his varied collection of wooden African sculptures. He coats each figure with a layer of wax to obscure its individual identity before “sculpting” it at a firing range with gunshots. The figures are then cast anew in bronze and he renames each after a victim of brutality, imparting idiosyncrasy into the newly revitalized figures.

Biggers’s textile pieces encode his own symbolism into found antique quilts. The past and present commingle in a collaboration between Biggers and the often-unknown quilters.