For over two decades, Sanford Biggers has been developing a singular body of work that is deeply informed by African American history and traditions, and sustains a rich dialog with contemporary art on a national and international level, referencing urban culture, the body, sacred geometry, and American symbolism.
In 2009, Sanford Biggers was commissioned by Hidden City Philadelphia, a month-long cultural project, to produce a work for the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a stop on the Underground Railroad. As Biggers researched the history of the Underground Railroad, he became intrigued by the long-debated historical narrative that quilts doubled as signposts along nineteenth-century escape routes. Inspired by those stories, he created his first quilt-based artworks for the Philadelphia project, hanging traditional-seeming quilts that visually engaged the church’s stained-glass windows. He also created and circulated a “celestial map” documenting the city’s Underground Railroad sites in which Mother Bethel figured as the North Star.
The title of the exhibition, Codeswitch, refers to both the artists’ quilt series known as the Codex series and to the idea of code-switching itself, or shifting from one linguistic code to another depending on the social context. The Codex series includes mixed media paintings and sculptures done directly on or made from pre-1900 antique quilts. This process, like linguistic code-switching, recognizes language plurality, as the quilts signal their original creator’s intent as well as the new layers of meaning given to them through Biggers’s artistic intervention.
The tradition of quilt-making holds a significant place in American culture and has special resonance in Black communities, as witnessed in the quilts of Gee’s Bend- small, insulated African American community in Alabama that has produced hundreds of quilts from the nineteenth century to the present. Women there have produced hundreds of quilts from the nineteenth century to the present. That tradition has been upheld by contemporary artists such as Faith Ringgold, Emma Amos, Sam Gilliam, and Sanford Biggers.
Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch was co-organized by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, New Orleans, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York and organized by Andrea Andersson (Founding Director and Chief Curator, Rivers Institute) and Antonio Sergio Bessa (Director of Curatorial Programs, Bronx Museum). The exhibition at CAAM is curated by Rivers Institute and is the first project in a multi-year collaboration between CAAM and Rivers. The exhibition and catalog are made possible by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund: Culpeper Arts & Culture Program, Henry Luce Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Massimo De Carlo, David Castillo Gallery, Monique Meloche Gallery, Baldwin Gallery, and Yale University Press.
This exhibition premiered at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York and was on view from September 09, 2020 to April 04, 2021. It then traveled to the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA, and was on view to the public from July 28, 2021 to January 23, 2022. The final iteration of this exhibition will be at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY and will be on view to the public from March 18, 2022 to June 26, 2022.
In coordination with this exhibition, Rivers also presents the digital publication, Sanford Biggers: a fractal approach, an invitation to intimate exploration of Biggers’ quilts and their fractal logic of unending discovery.
