To Sanford Biggers, the past, present, and future are intertwined and all part of one big, long now. Over the past three decades, the Harlem-based artist has woven various threads of place and time—in ways not dissimilar to a hip-hop D.J. or a quilter—to create clever, deeply metaphorical, darkly humorous, and often beautiful work across a vast array of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, photography, music, and performance. “The simultaneity of past, present, and future is always involved in my work,” he says on this episode of Time Sensitive. “I even consider myself a collaborator with history, making work in the present to be unpacked somewhere in the future.” Among his standout works are “Oracle” (2021), a 25-foot-tall cast bronze sculpture that combines a Greco-Roman form with an African mask; his “BAM” series (2015) of gunshot statuettes, which violently reinterpret African tribal figurines; “Orin” (2004), a series of Japanese singing bowls made out of melted-down hip-hop jewelry; and his ongoing “Codex” series of quilts, which have, over his past decade of making them, become an especially potent and ritualistic part of his art-making. Biggers’s work is informed by a vast range of influences, from years spent living in Italy and Japan, to 1980s and ’90s Los Angeles hip-hop and graffiti culture, to Buddhism and monuments.
