Sanford Biggers | The Gift of Tongues

Sanford Biggers presents new work exploring language, spirituality, and cultural exchange.

Why go

Biggers stages an immersive, psychedelic environment that rewrites material storytelling through hybrid forms—combining African diasporic traditions, classical sculpture, and American quilts to challenge power dynamics embedded in art history and cultural representation.

What to expect

The gallery becomes an intricate stage with strategically placed curtains and false walls; viewers navigate discreet vignettes revealing works from the Codex, Chimera, and Shimmer series, encountering marble busts draped in quilts, sequined cloud forms, and painted figures that appear and disappear within patterned backdrops.

Things to know

• Biggers (b. 1970, Los Angeles) works across painting, sculpture, film, collage, performance, and music as an artistic intermediary.
• His Chimera sculptures combine classical, neoclassical, and African sculptural traditions, hybridizing marble forms with quilts and mask ele
• Antique quilts—referenced in folklore as Underground Railroad signposts—form the heart of his Codex series, which he paints, collages, and m
• Cloud motifs have been embedded in Biggers's visual vocabulary for decades, first appearing in his graffiti work in Los Angeles in the 1990s
• Biggers received the 2026 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship in Art and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 2023.
• His work is held in MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, among other