Sanford Biggers is weaving new narratives into American history
At The Bronx Museum, the first survey of quilt-based works by New York-based artist Sanford Biggers sources codes in American history through pre-1900 antique quilts
The earliest traces of quilt making can be found in 3400 BC. Since then, the art of quilting winds through cultures across the globe, serving a broad range of functions: domestic, commemorative, sartorial and decorative.
Quilting is a tradition tightly stitched into the fabric of American history. From the quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, who occupy a remote hamlet on the Alabama River and have a history of quilting that dates back to the early 20th century, to the continuation of quilting traditions in the work of contemporary artists such as Faith Ringgold and Sam Gilliam.
Perhaps less familiar is quilting’s link to code-switching, the act of alternating between languages or linguistic codes according to context.
These are the themes embedded in New York-based artist Sanford Biggers’ latest show, ‘Codeswitch’, a presentation of almost 60 quilt-based works, which has just opened at The Bronx Museum.
Biggers is perhaps best known for works that reference African American history, ongoing police brutality against Black Americans and Buddhist spiritualism through a practice spanning film, performance, music and sculpture. Biggers draws connections between apparently disparate cultural practices and examines current sociopolitical events while unearthing the contexts that conceived them.
During the last decade, he has turned to quilts as a vehicle to transport new narratives. These often come to him in the form of antique heirlooms, which he acquires and alters. The series in this exhibition, titled Codex, includes mixed media paintings and sculptures placed directly on or made from pre-1900 quilts. He treats these works like an archive, an ‘ongoing material conversation that acquires new meanings over time’.
Biggers made his first quilt in 2009 for the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, a stop on the Underground Railroad network. This led him to explore the much-disputed folklore narrative that during the antebellum period, quilt designs – hidden in plain sight on fences, washing lines and trees – communicated coded information to African American slaves about routes to freedom through the railroad system.
‘I began to search out quilts from the 1800s and add new layers of code through mark-making, painting, cutting, collaging and reconstruction’ Biggers explains. ‘I’m also interested in the tension of working on these objects that hold so much cultural and artistic weight, like embellishing or perhaps defacing history.’ In these works, Biggers views himself as a ‘late collaborator’, imposing contemporary interventions so viewers might interpret the series as a ‘trans-generational “codex” to decipher aspects of American culture’.
Much like linguistic code-switching, Biggers’ work deals in seamless plurality: the power of the past mixed with contemporary thought; high and low brow aesthetics; a liberated colour palette and black comedy. ‘The works in this show actively code switch. They exist as drawings, paintings, objects, archives, craft, low and high art,’ Biggers tells Wallpaper*. ‘My embellishment, erasure, defacement, and repair complicates the provenance and gender of these relics of Americana. They are remixed, chopped and screwed but their softness is ultimately their power.’
INFORMATION
'Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch', until 24 January 2021, The Bronx Museum of the Arts. bronxmuseum.org
ADDRESS
1040 Grand Concourse
NY 10456
Wallpaper* Newsletter
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
Harriet Lloyd-Smith was the Arts Editor of Wallpaper*, responsible for the art pages across digital and print, including profiles, exhibition reviews, and contemporary art collaborations. She started at Wallpaper* in 2017 and has written for leading contemporary art publications, auction houses and arts charities, and lectured on review writing and art journalism. When she’s not writing about art, she’s making her own.
-
Maude’s Brâncuși-inspired sex toys go on display in a new Paris exhibition
Maude’s design-led vibrators are now on display at Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, as part of ‘Private Lives: From the Bedroom to Social Media’. Brand founder Éva Goicochea talks to Wallpaper* about partnering with the museum and opening up cultural conversations around sex
By India Birgitta Jarvis Published
-
‘I was captivated by the idea of merging two iconic brands’: Nigo on his 1990s-inspired collaboration with Moncler and Mercedes-Benz
Unveiled at Moncler’s ‘The City of Genius’ event in Shanghai this past weekend, Japanese fashion designer Nigo unpacks his three-way collaboration with Moncler and Mercedes-Benz, which includes a play on the G-Class alongside a fashion collection in his eclectic style
By Jack Moss Published
-
Cathay Pacific’s new business class Aria Suites take flight
Cathay Pacific raises the bar for business-class travel with the launch of the much-anticipated Aria Suites
By Lauren Ho Published
-
Brutalism in film: the beautiful house that forms the backdrop to The Room Next Door
The Room Next Door's production designer discusses mood-boarding and scene-setting for a moving film about friendship, fragility and the final curtain
By Anne Soward Published
-
'There’s an anxiety under all of it': Violet Dennison in New York
Violet Dennison debuts abstract paintings with new show 'Damaged Self' at Tara Downs Gallery
By Mary Cleary Published
-
‘Gas Tank City’, a new monograph by Andrew Holmes, is a photorealist eye on the American West
‘Gas Tank City’ chronicles the artist’s journey across truck-stop America, creating meticulous drawings of fleeting moments
By Jonathan Bell Published
-
Mark Armijo McKnight’s bodily landscapes capture the tactile serenity of the American West
The artist’s new exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which is organised by the museum curator Drew Sawyer, offers a succinct window into his contemplative suggestion of queering a landscape
By Osman Can Yerebakan Published
-
Dark, glamorous and hedonistic: a photography book captures New York in the 1990s
New York: High Life, Low Life, by Dafydd Jones, goes behind the scenes of New York society
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Derrick Alexis Coard’s portraits are a sensitive, positive testimony to Black men
The late artist Derrick Alexis Coard’s retrospective ‘I Am That I Am’, at New York’s Salon 94, honours his ‘symbolic expression for possible change for the African-American male community’
By Tianna Williams Published
-
Intimacy, violence and the uncanny: Joanna Piotrowska in Philadelphia
Artist and photographer Joanna Piotrowska stages surreal scenes at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania
By Hannah Silver Published
-
First look: Sphere’s new exterior artwork draws on a need for human connection
Wallpaper* talks to Tom Hingston about his latest large-scale project – designing for the Exosphere
By Charlotte Gunn Published