Sanford Biggers: Back to the Stars by Monique Meloche Gallery

Sanford Biggers

Back to the Stars 1

Front and back cover: Furrow, 2023 (detail) 4

Sanford Biggers

Back to the Stars

Monique Meloche Gallery September 14-November 3, 2023

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Sanford Biggers’ fourth solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Table of Contents Introduction

Interview

Installation views

Artworks

Biographies

Exhibition Checklist

Introduction 10

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Sanford Biggers: Back to the Stars, the artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery, showcases new artworks from his ever-evolving Chimera and Codex series which juxtaposes figurative marble sculptures and quilt compositions. Biggers’ practice brings aesthetic, poetic, and social insights to the intertwining stories embedded in material culture. His creative processes recognize and conflate syncretic impulses between aesthetic expressions from seemingly disparate societies and histories, transforming them into rigorously formal and conceptual artworks. Biggers’ Chimera sculptures combine various African and European masks, busts, and figures that explore historical depictions of the body and their subsequent myths, narratives, archetypes, perceptions, and power. Back to the Stars features two new cast marble busts adorned and enigmatically veiled with hand-painted elements. Biggers’ polychromatic intervention disrupts the historically revered iconic white marble canon, questioning the nature of authenticity, authority, and origin just as early 20th-century documentation of African objects were “blackwashed” or memorialized without their original paint and raffia decoration restored. Intrigued by recent scholarship on the historical “whitewashing” of classical Greco-Roman sculpture and its convergence with the “blackwashing” of various African sculptural objects in the early twentieth century, Biggers revitalizes the ancient tradition of polychromy and challenges the associated cultural and aesthetic assumptions connected to the source materials while acknowledging the often inconsistent provenances of these objects. The marbles are shown alongside a new work in his kaleidoscopic Codex series-a large-scale quiltwork composed from stitched geometric swatches stretched across a plywood armature to form a three-dimensional object that resembles folded paper. These origami-like quilts map a constellation of references from Japanese woodblock prints to Gee’s Bend quilts, from Duchamp ready-mades to signposts on the Underground Railroad. Having collected quilts over the course of many years, in this series Biggers’ aesthetic considerations of palette and pattern illuminate conceptual considerations of syncretism and appropriation. Back to the Stars rejects fixed narratives of quilt and marble traditions. Instead, Biggers’ new works gracefully traverse the intricate layers woven into their composition, embracing the balance between the masculine and feminine, resilience and fragility, eternal and ephemeral. Through this nuanced and conceptual patchwork, the artist ushers his practice into the future, revealing the inherent essence of each piece as it harmonizes with the passage of time.

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Interview

Talking Time Interview by Spencer Bailey The following is an excerpt of an interview between Sanford Biggers and the writer, editor, and journalist Spencer Bailey, recorded on September 27, 2023, for Ep. 99 of the podcast Time Sensitive, produced by the New York–based media company The Slowdown. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity. Listen to the full episode on timesensitive.fm, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. SPENCER BAILEY: What’s Sanford Biggers’s take on time? SANFORD BIGGERS: Oh, time. Where to begin with that? I’m always looking at the past. I’m always looking at history. I’m looking at historical objects, periods, moments, phrases, ideas, inventions, and analyzing them from a current perspective. And then, with that twist of irony that I have somehow inherited by living in America all my life—or most of my life—wondering how it can be tweaked, or how true any of it really is, or how long those truths will exist before they are proven untrue or considered untrue or inconvenient or need to be manipulated and changed to serve other agendas. I’ve often said that history is malleable and, in a sense, time is malleable, although time is bigger than history. History is just an increment of time. But I think that relationship is something that we all need to be wary of. I say a lot of this tongue in cheek, but we literally are watching truths and histories change before our eyes. Things that we were convinced were the truth, the end word, the statement, the period on the end of the sentence—we knew these to be self-evident and factual. And now we’re being asked to reconsider those or are being told that they were wrong or, once again, that they’re inconvenient. Things have to change to serve certain agendas and certain apparati. That being said, I think my work does that, too. I started pursuing that in my work years ago, before I started seeing how rapidly the change of our beliefs or the victimization of our beliefs started to occur. I don’t know if I’m ahead or in sync or behind that conversation. I guess it’s all unfolding now. I guess that’s where the future comes in and that idea of simultaneity. BAILEY: There’s this great 2018 profile of you in The New Yorker by Vinson Cunningham, and he describes “a beguiling tone that stretches across Biggers’s eclectic body of work: an almost placid surface giving way, over time, to a dark, ambiguous joke.” This, I think, says so much about time in relation to your work. Could you talk a bit about that? BIGGERS: Sure. I think, in some ways, the work I make is maybe a proto punchline. There’s definitely some type of humor you can glean from the work at any

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Venus Sutra, 2023 (detail)

given moment, but the real question is, what happens in the future and how is that work read? What will be in favor and what will fall out of favor? Because all of those seem to be inevitabilities at a certain point. And tone. Tone is also a very important aspect of creating, to me. I never wanted to be an artist who just worked in one series and just kept making the same thing, and maybe tweaking a little bit here and a little bit there. I like to think of it more as a classic album. An album has all of these dips and dives and catharsis and peaks and valleys, and ultimately, I want my oeuvre to have that, as well. Humor is a big part of that, but sometimes there is knee-slapping humor and sometimes there’s more dark humor, black humor specifically, entendres intended and everything. I’m really into that.

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Oneroi (La Sirena), 2023

BAILEY: You’ve also mentioned before that you have a certain anxiety about time—that you want more of it, basically. BIGGERS: It’s a recent phenomenon, and I think it’s basically, after becoming a father, number one. The second aspect is losing both of my parents in the last five years. So a sense of mortality, and also, speaking of humor, I was laughing and didn’t consider time at all for years, and then all of a sudden, I turn around and I think, well, is the joke on me? Time always catches you. I think that sense of mortality, it’s real. I’m over 50 years old, so it’s something to consider. And what am I able to do? What am I able to leave behind? BAILEY: Talking about time with you, we have to talk about hip-hop. You’ve said that you consider hip-hop D.J.s to be time travelers. Could you elaborate on this D.J. quality of your work? BIGGERS: Sure. I see the D.J. as also related to a jazz drummer or an improvisationalist, in the sense that they’re time travelers because they literally stretch and bend time. You see it very blatantly in jazz, because that is one of

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the hallmarks of jazz, to be able to shift and change things and to break the norm and break the pattern. And D.J.s, specifically, literally queuing up and changing pitch and changing time, and then taking old records that may have been played at one tempo before and chopping and screwing and slowing them down and turning them to a different tempo, or even taking small pieces from any of that and changing the pitch up or pitch down. So D.J.s and producers, especially with music today, it’s all about time and bending time and traveling through time in that sense. The D.J. also has the added mobility of playing things from the present and playing things from the past. So even referentially speaking, they are traveling through time. And where that comes up in my work is thinking about movements, and references, and inspirations in the exact same way. I don’t hold deference to things that were made thousands of years ago. I look at them as just another tool in the tool chest or another color on the palette, and I try not to give them any more power than something that might’ve happened this morning or something that might happen tomorrow, and look at them as all fodder to play with. Because once you start to combine and recombine and mix and juxtapose those things, it suspends your sense of time. If we don’t learn from the past, what are we really doing? We have to put those lessons learned into whatever it is we create, whatever it is that we do, to push things forward. I know it’s ambiguous sometimes, but that is what we all, humankind, do.

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Installation Views 21

Artworks 32

Venus Sutra, 2023 antique quilts, birch plywood, gold leaf 73 x 51 1/2 x 18 in 185.4 x 130.8 x 45.7 cm

detail

Furrow, 2023 antique quilts, assorted textiles, mixed media on fiberglass 63 x 67 1/2 x 3 in 160 x 171.4 x 7.6 cm

detail

Oneroi (Relic 2), 2023 cast marble, assorted textiles. mixed media on custom cedar plinth 36 x 22 x 19 in 91.4 x 55.9 x 48.3 cm Plinth: 30 x 22 x 26 in

detail

Detail

Oneroi (Relic 1), 2023 cast marble, assorted textiles, mixed media, gold leaf on custom cedar plinth 37 1/2 x 55 1/4 x 95 1/2 in 95.3 x 140.3 x 242.6 cm Plinth: 30 x 22 x 26 in

detail

Untitled, 2023 antique quilt, birch plywood, gold leaf 31 1/2 x 21 x 10 1/2 in 80 x 53.3 x 26.7 cm

detail

Voyage to Atlantis, 2023 antique quilt, assorted textiles, mixed media mounted on felt 42 x 41 3/4 x 1 3/8 in 106.7 x 106 x 3.5 cm

detail

Oneroi (La Sirena), 2023 assorted textiles, mixed media, archival paper mounted on felt 24 1/2 x 25 x 1 1/2 in 62.2 x 63.5 x 3.8 cm

detail

Promiscuous Platform, 2023 assorted textiles, mixed media, archival paper mounted on felt 31 1/2 x 30 1/4 x 1 1/2 in 80 x 76.8 x 3.8 cm

detail

Untitled, 2023 Assorted textiles, mixed media, archival paper mounted on felt 28 1/2 x 29 1/2 x 1 3/8 in 72.4 x 74.9 x 3.5 cm

detail

Biographies

Sanford Biggers (b.1970, Los Angeles, CA) received a BA from Morehouse College, Atlanta, and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he sits on the Board of Governors. He was a former Associate Professor at Columbia University’s Visual Arts program. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1998). Notable solo exhibitions include Salina Art Center Kansas, Salina, KS (2022); Chazen Museum, Madison, WI (2022); Speed Museum, Louisville, KY (2022); The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. (2021); The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2021); and The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY (2020). Notable group exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO (2023); Rudolph Tegner Museum, Dronningmølle, Denmark (2022); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (2022); Cleveland Art Museum of Art and Design, Cleveland, OH

Photo by Meghan Marin

(2022); Crystal Bridges Museum of American

Art, Bentonville, AR (2022); Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum, NY(2021); Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC (2021); Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2021); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2021); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2020). Public collections include Newark Museum of Art, NJ; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Bass Museum, Miami, FL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Bronx Museum, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Biggers has received numerous awards and accolades, including the 26th Heinz Award for the Arts (2021), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), and a Joyce Foundation Award and NEA Grant (2015) for assisting with a year-long project in Detroit that resulted in Subjective Cosmology, his solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016). He also received the Arts and Letters Award in Art (2018) presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Biggers currently lives and works in New York, NY.

Spencer Bailey is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the New York–based media company The Slowdown and host of the Time Sensitive podcast. He is also the editor-at-large of the book publisher Phaidon. A writer, editor, and journalist, he has written at length about architecture, art, culture, design, and technology, and contributed to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Fortune, and Newsweek. From 2013 to 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Surface magazine. He is the author of the books Alchemy: The Material World of David Adjaye (Phaidon, 2023), In Memory Of: Designing Contemporary Memorials (Phaidon, 2020), and Tham ma da: The Adventurous Interiors of Paola Navone (Pointed Leaf Press, 2016), as well as the co-author of At a Distance: 100 Visionaries at Home in a Pandemic (Apartamento, 2021). Bailey has spoken at or moderated live talks at venues including the Aspen Ideas Festival, Cannes Lions, and the 92nd Street Y, and has been on the juries of the Hyères Design Parade festival, the CFDA Fashion Awards, the James Beard Restaurant Design Awards, the Rado Star Prize, and the Swarovski Designers of the Future Award. He has taught a workshop in the Design Research master’s program at the School of Visual Arts. In 2023, he was named to the Wallpaper USA 300 list of “talents that are forging new paths through America’s design landscape.” Bailey is also the co-chair of the board of trustees of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York, and serves on the New York honorary committee of L’École, School of Jewelry Arts, which is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels. Born and raised in Colorado, he is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Dickinson College. He lives in New York City.

Exhibition Checklist Oneroi (Relic 2), 2023 cast marble, assorted textiles. mixed media on custom cedar plinth 36 x 22 x 19 in 91.4 x 55.9 x 48.3 cm Plinth: 30 x 22 x 26 in

Oneroi (La Sirena), 2023 assorted textiles, mixed media, archival paper mounted on felt 24 1/2 x 25 x 1 1/2 in 62.2 x 63.5 x 3.8 cm Venus Sutra, 2023 antique quilts, birch plywood, gold leaf 73 x 51 1/2 x 18 in 185.4 x 130.8 x 45.7 cm

Furrow, 2023 antique quilts, assorted textiles, mixed media on fiberglass 63 x 67 1/2 x 3 in 160 x 171.4 x 7.6 cm

Promiscuous Platform, 2023 assorted textiles, mixed media, archival paper mounted on felt 31 1/2 x 30 1/4 x 1 1/2 in 80 x 76.8 x 3.8 cm

Oneroi (Relic 1), 2023 cast marble, assorted textiles, mixed media, gold leaf on custom cedar plinth, unique within a series 37 1/2 x 55 1/4 x 95 1/2 in 95.3 x 140.3 x 242.6 cm Plinth: 30 x 22 x 26 in

Untitled, 2023 antique quilt, birch plywood, gold leaf 31 1/2 x 21 x 10 1/2 in 80 x 53.3 x 26.7 cm

Untitled, 2023 assorted textiles, mixed media, archival paper mounted on felt 28 1/2 x 29 1/2 x 1 3/8 in 72.4 x 74.9 x 3.5 cm

Voyage to Atlantis, 2023 antique quilt, assorted textiles, mixed media mounted on felt 42 x 41 3/4 x 1 3/8 in 106.7 x 106 x 3.5 cm

Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com