About the Exhibition
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 15, 4 to 7pm
moniquemeloche is thrilled to present Sanford Biggers’ third solo show at the gallery, and his first at our newly-expanded West Town location. Working across an expansive spectrum of mediums in the service of multivalent conceptual interests, Biggers roots his practice in the excavation of histories to shed light on the present. Having recently spent a year in Rome as a 2017 American Academy Fellow in Visual Arts, Biggers has created a new body of marble sculptures which develop the artist’s use of classical materials as a means of destabilizing and reconfiguring their historical evocations. In addition to these marble works, the exhibition will also comprise a new group of quilt paintings and wall reliefs that are demonstrative of Biggers’ eclectic, trans-historical practice. Drawing upon a varied and broad view of the past and its irrevocable ties to the present, Biggers speaks to contemporary socio-political conditions precisely in his summoning of their non-linear and revelatory origins.
Sanford Biggers (born 1970 Los Angeles, lives and works New York) 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 Trustees. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1998), and has received numerous awards and accolades, including a Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2008), and a Joyce Foundation Award and NEA Grant in 2015 to assist with a year-long project in Detroit that resulted in Subjective Cosmology, his solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016). Other selected solo shows include Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis (2018); Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2017); Massimo de Carlo, London (2016); Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA (2012); Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2011); and Sculpture Center, New York (2011). His work is in the permanent collection of the Equal Justice Initiative’s new Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL; the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Museum of Art Design, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Selected group exhibitions include Open Spaces, Kansas City (2018); Sculpture Milwaukee 2018; Jacob Lawrence: Lines of Influence, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2017); Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY and the Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham NC (2016); The Freedom Principle, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (2015); Prospect 1, New Orleans (2008); Illuminations, Tate Modern, London (2007); Performa 07, New York (2007); Whitney Biennial, New York (2002); and Freestyle, The Studio Museum in Harlem (2001). Biggers was a 2016 TED Fellow and received a 2017-18 Rome Prize in Visual Arts, which included a yearlong residency at the American Academy in Rome. He also received the 2018 Arts and Letters Award in Art presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.