Afrofuturism (noun): A cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of history that explores the developing intersection of African diaspora culture, the capabilities of technology, and speculative fiction. It encompasses a range of media and is employed by artists interested in envisioning Black futures that stem from African diasporic experiences. While it is commonly associated with science fiction, it can also encompass other genres such as fantasy, alternate history, and magical realism.

Dada (noun): Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected traditional forms of aesthetic beauty, reason, and militarism as a way of critiquing Western capitalist society and the horrors of mass industrialization. Dada artist’s investment in satire, irony, radical politics, scathing forms of humor, and existential questioning of fine art and its histories resonates deeply in Biggers’ work and conceptual formation, as the title reflects. The title of Biggers’s work Big Dada makes reference to this significant avant-garde movement as well as to the phrase “Big Data”—a field that treats ways to analyze and systemically extract information and organize large sets of data too large or complex to understand in traditional ways. By combining a historical movement dependent on questioning-thru-humor with a contemporary field of discourse concerned with the interpretation and gathering of vast archives of information and knowledge, Biggers suggests that art and history are sites of critical resistance and vehicles of archival knowledge as large and looming as data sets on a computer. In this exhibition, quilts stand as material metaphors for working with history and information in this way.

Bricolage (noun): Derived from the French verb bricoler, meaning “to tinker,” or “do-it-yourself.” The construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media. It has been described in the arts as the remixture, reconstruction, and reuse of separate materials or artifacts to produce new meanings and insights.

Cheshire cat (noun): The Cheshire cat is a fictional cat character known for his elusive behavior and mischievous grin. The first known appearance of the character in literature is in Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788), but was popularized by the British author Lewis Carrol in his novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Alice first encounters the Cheshire cat in the kitchen of the Duchess’s house and later on in the branches of a tree where it gradually appears and disappears at will and engages Alice in perplexing and, at times, philosophical conversation. It stands as a symbol of menace and amusement, dark histories and entertainment. It has been proposed that the Cheshire cat is a stand-in for Carroll’s Oxford University professor and mentor Edward Bouverie Pusey, who was known as the Patristic Catenary (or “chain”); as a trained mathematician, Carroll would have been familiar with other meanings of catenary, namely, the curve of a horizontally suspended chain suggestive of a cat’s grin.

Cocles, Horatius (Roman, Dates Unknown): Publius Horatius Cocles was an officer in the army of the early Roman Republic and became famous for defending the Pons Sublicius from the invading army of Etruscan King Lars Porsena of Cluny in 6th century B.C. during the wars between Rome and Cluism. He was a member of the ancient patrician house of the Horatii and a celebrated warrior, and is said to have obtained his nickname “Cocles” (or “one-eyed”) after losing an eye in the Battle of the Sublican Bridge while defending Rome’s city walls. This story of Horatius at the Bridge appears across many ancient texts with many philosophers and writers questioning the truthfulness and accuracy of the narrative, but it continues to be recounted in literature and political rhetoric as a metaphor for the heroism of those who hold enemies at bay and those who die for political causes.

Code (noun): in communication and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information–such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture–into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication channel or storage in a storage medium.

Code-switching (noun): in linguistics, code-switching (or language alternation) occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation in a manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety. This common practice may begin in one language and finish in another. The earliest use of the term “code-switching” in print was by Lucy Shepard Freeland in her 1951 book Language of the Sierra Miwok, referring to the indigenous people of California.

Codex (noun): The word “codex” comes from the Latin caudex, meaning “trunk of a tree,” “block of wood,” or “book.” A manuscript book of handwritten contents especially of Scripture, classics, or ancient annals and the historical ancestor of the modern book. In the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D., the codex began to replace the older scroll as the preferred form for longer writings. Unlike the scroll, the invention permitted writing on both sides of a sheet, made it easy to locate particular passages, and could contain very extended texts. Codices (plural) were usually written on parchment made from papyrus (the ancestor of paper) or prepared skin of a goat or sheep. Because codices were handwritten, few copies of individual codex remain.

Combine (noun): a term artist Jasper Johns first used to describe a body of work by Robert Rauschenberg that consisted of three-dimensional objects integrated into paintings as a way of collapsing historical divisions between painting and sculpture; art objects and everyday objects; and thus, the realms of art and everyday life. Items attached to paintings might include three-dimensional everyday objects, such as clothing or furniture, as well as printed matter such as newsprint or photographs. Recent scholarship and criticism has pointed to the series’ overt resemblance to work by Black American artists of Rauschenberg’s generation who were working with assemblage and found objects in the rural South–work Rauschenberg would have seen during his upbringing in Port Arthur, Texas and the Southern Delta region.

Ecclesiastes: 1 (Biblical scripture): While its true author remains unknown, the book of Ecclesiastes is traditionally associated with King Solomon of Israel and encompasses his conclusions on the meaning of life and his dissatisfaction with it. Known as “The Vanity of Life”, Ecclesiastes: 1 begins with Solomon’s bold claim that “all is vanity” or “all is meaningless,” with a final conclusion that his efforts to be and make “something new” is futile and will be remembered by no one. Biggers’s titles one of his works after this specific scripture, as if the artist is the one talking to himself as Solomon does—questioning his purpose as a maker and a man. The passage reads, in part, as follows:

“The words of the preacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever. The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose. The wind goes towards the south, and turns around to the north; the wind whirls about continually, and comes again on its circuit. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place from which the rivers come, there they return again. All things are full of labor; man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it may be said, “See, this is new?” It has already been in ancient times before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come by those who will come after.”

Harlequin (noun): one of the most recognizable figures of the Zanni comedic servant characters of the Commedia dell’Arte, an improvised form of popular theater originating in northern Italy in the 16th century by traveling troupes. Known for his checkered costume and black leather mask, the harlequin character was known for his physical agility, slapstick comedic persona, multifaceted nature, and his cunning, shrewd, and “trickster-like” behavior, at times the catalyst for political and social subversion. Recent scholarship has pointed to the harlequin’s mask as an early iteration of blackface and minstrelsy due to the exaggerated physical proportions of the mask and the representation of Black personhood as “naturally foolish and devilish.”

Jargon (noun): the specialized, technical words or expressions used by a particular profession, group, or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular communicative context and may not be well understood outside that context. Jargon differs from “slang” in being expressive and secretive in nature.

Lukasa (noun): Roughly translated as “the long hand,” or “claw,” is a memory device created, manipulated, and protected by the Bambudye–a once powerful secret society of the Luba people indigenous to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Taking a variety of shapes such as stools, staffs, figures, or tablets, lukasa are approximately the same size (approx. 20-25 cm long) and are often made of wood with decorations of metal, shells, or beads, and are incised or embossed with carved symbols. Thought to stimulate the recollection of important people, places, things, relationships, and events, court historians known as bana balute (“men of memory”) run their fingertips across the surface of the lukasa while reciting genealogies, migration stories, epic tales, and stories of cultural and military heroes.

Mandalas (plural noun): geometric configurations of symbols. In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing the attention of practitioners, as a spiritual guidance tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. These devotional images are present in a variety of Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Shintoism and are used as maps or diagrams of an ideal universe. They are often painted on scrolls and taken with travelers over long distances across the Eurasian continent.

Mooney, Paul (American, 1941-2021): Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Paul Mooney was an American comedian, writer, social critic, and actor and is best known for his boundary-pushing routines about racism, white supremacy, and social justice and a barely-controlled anger. A longtime behind-the-scenes collaborator to fellow comedian Richard Pryor, the two worked together on a variety of Pryor’s television specials, films, and late night appearances including early episodes of “Sanford & Sons” and the film “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling” (1986). Mooney also wrote and performed on Fox’s “In Living Color” with Daymon Wayans and Dave Chappelle’s “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000’s. Mooney died in 2021 after a long struggle with prostate cancer.

Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (noun): Located in Center City Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, “Mother Bethel” was established in 1794 on what is now the oldest continuously Black-owned plot of land in the United States. Founded by Richard Allen, a Delaware-born former slave, in 1783, the church was proposed in 1791 by members of the Free African Society of Philadelphia out of a desire to create a space for autonomous African American worship and community in the city. Across the 19th century, the church was a beacon to the still-enslaved, serving as a Philadelphia sanctuary and station along the Underground Railroad to freedom. Biggers was commissioned by Hidden City in 2009 to realize a work for the church, resulting in his early research and construction of quilt-based works.

Negerplastik (noun): A member of the Berlin Dada group, Carl Einstein (German, 1885-1940), was a pivotal figure in the development of European modernism during the interwar era. Einstein’s book Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture), published in 1915, represents the first European critical response to African sculpture and challenged various prejudices and racist misconceptions around the subject. Published to introduce European audiences to African sculpture, the book is full of black-and-white photographic plates of works culled from Belgian and French colonies denuded of the hats, beads, and feathers that originally adorned them. Einstein’s desire to educate his presumed white audiences about these works and desire to affirm that African sculpture should be treated and interpreted as equal to European fine art falls flat in his representation of works in historically inaccurate poses, environments, and adornments. The book catalyzed an odd incentive for 20th-century African artists and merchants who began to make tchotchkes based on these inaccurate plates in order to sell their work to white European tourists.

Nimbus (noun): a luminous vapor, cloud, or atmosphere about a god or goddess when on Earth. A cloud or atmosphere (as of romance) about a person or thing. An indication (such as a circle) of radiant light or glory about the head of a drawn or sculptured divinity, saint, or sovereign, otherwise known as an aureole, gloriole, or halo. A rain cloud.

Nyabinghi (c. 1750-c. 1813): A prominent female political and religious figure in the history of Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania, her name roughly translates as “the one who possesses many things.” A cult of worship and veneration developed around her in the early 1800’s in southern regions of Uganda, with worshipers bringing offerings to mediums who would negotiate with her spirit on the believer’s behalf. This religious sect found ground with a range of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist groups across the 19th and 20th centuries inspired by the group’s investment in pre-colonial spiritual and cultural practices. By the 1930’s, knowledge of a “secret society” of Nyabinghi devoted to abolishing white colonial rule and debilitating economic extraction practices circulated across the Caribbean and influenced early practitioners of Jamaican Rastafari–an Afrocentric social and religious movement calling for the resettlement of all African diasporic communities in Africa (known to them as “Zion.”) By the 1950’s Rasta musicians in Jamaica had developed a style known as “Nyabinghi drumming,” which combined pre-colonial musical forms from West African, African American, and South American indigenous groups. In the work of the same name, Biggers’ assemblage of quilt pieces island textiles bound in frames holds at its center a silhouette of a woman wearing a headdress that is perhaps Nyabinghi herself. Biggers’s titles one of his works in homage to her historical and cultural significance.

Polke, Sigmar (German, 1941-2010): A German artist known for his unconventional mixing of materials and styles in paintings, sculptures and photographs. Together with fellow artists Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer, Polke founded in 1963 the Capitalist Realist movement, an irreverent critique of both the Social Realist style that still prevailed in the Soviet Union, and the consumer mentality of Capitalist societies in the postwar era. It was in this context that Polke started to paint on industrially produced furnishing fabric. In subsequent years, as he turned his attention to Germany’s turbulent history, the kitschy patterns he used as background strangely heightened the horrors of war.

Powers, Harriet (American, 1837-1910): born into slavery in rural Georgia, Powers was an American folk artist and quilt maker. Historians have proposed that much of her early life was spent on Nestor Plantation in Madison County, where it is believed she learned to sew from other enslaved persons. Historian Kyra Hicks recently attributed a letter to Powers in which she explains how she came to read and write and the ways in which Bible stories provided inspiration for the stories told in her own quilts. Her use of traditional appliqué and piecework techniques in her quilts demonstrate a knowledge of African and African American handiwork, which blend geometric and abstract designs with figural forms to communicate local legends, Bible stories, and astronomical events.

Quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama (plural noun): Created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African American hamlet of Gee’s Bend, Alabama along the Alabama River, the quilts of Gee’s Bend are among the most important African American visual and cultural contributions to the history of art in the United States. The area is named after the slaveholder Joseph Gee, who established a cotton plantation in 1816; the plantation was sold to Mark Pettway in 1845 and many members of the community still carry his surname. After emancipation, many freed slaves and their family members stayed remained on this isolated land as sharecroppers. Beginning in the 1960’s, the community gained attention for their production and archival collection of quilts due to the attention of curator, historian, and folk art collector William Arnett and his Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. The distinct style developed by this community of women departs from classical quilt making and is influenced in part by Native American textiles, African textile patterns, and a spirit of improvisation and geometric minimalism dictated by the community’s isolation and lack of materials. In 2003, the Gee’s Bend Collective, owned and operated by the women of Gee’s Bend, was established as a way to protect and support the creation and promotion of their community’s quilts.

“Quo Vadis?” (Latin, greeting): an ancient phrase meaning “Where are you marching?” or, more commonly, “Where are you going?” The phrase originates in the Christian tradition as the first words St. Peter utters to the risen Christ on the Appian Way. Peter, fleeing persecution by Emperor Nero in Rome, encounters Christ and asks “Lord, where are you going?” Christ replies, “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.” St. Peter, inspired by Christ’s bravery, turns back towards Rome to be martyred. Biggers’s uses this ancient phrase, so associated with tenacity and courage, for the title of one of his works, allowing it to take on new relevance in the heavily debated history regarding the use of quilt folds and patterns as signposts along the Underground Railroad, in which context, supposed coded messages such as “keep moving” or “here is safety” could be passed from one person to another seeking freedom.

Rubik’s Cube (noun): a tricky three-dimensional combination puzzle made of 26 miniature cubes constructed to move and rotate in a specific unfolding, holding millions of permutations in its solution. Biggers’s makes reference to this toy in the title of his work Kubrick’s Rube, which combines the name of the object with the name of the American film director, Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999). Known for his epic space film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Kubrick’s film captured the world due to its pioneering special effects, unconventional cinematic techniques, and engagement with existential questions of artificial intelligence, human evolution, technology, space travel. Biggers’s juxtaposition of nineteenth century quiltwork with science-fiction imagery points to the artist’s interest in the elasticity of historical time and the layers of information and meaning alive in these historical artifacts.

Sacred Geometry (noun): Sacred geometry ascribes symbolic and spiritual meanings to certain geometric shapes and proportions and is associated with the belief that god is the geometer of the world. This is visible in the geometric propositions used in the design and construction of religious structures such as churches, temples, mosques, monuments, altars, pagodas, and mandalas. The first complete writings on sacred geometry in Europe were written by the 17th-century German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, who believed in the geometric underpinnings of the cosmos and rooted his theories in Enlightenment Era debates about the mathematical principles that posited the presence of the divine across various historical eras and cultures. Geometric patterns and intricate spatial repetitions can be found all over Biggers’ work, pointing to his interest and knowledge of the historical layers and multicultural references at work in geometric visual codes.

Schaeffer, Pierre (French, 1910-1995): a French engineer, writer, and composer, Schaeffer was the founder, in 1951, of the highly influential Concrete Music Research Group in Paris, which advocated the use of pre-recorded sounds for composing. His experiments with magnetic tape and loops are the precursors of the electronic music that blossomed in the early 1970s in Europe spearheaded by groups such as Roxy Music and Kraftwerk. Schaeffer’s ideas also made an important contribution to jazz through the work of producer Teo Macero, who famously made use of loops, delays, reverbs, echos, cuts and splices in the production of Miles Davis’ pivotal album Bitches Brew. Ultimately, the experimental work pioneered by Schaeffer became popularized by early hip-hop groups such as Akrika Bambaataa, and Public Enemy.

Tate, Greg (American, 1957-2021): An American writer, musician, journalist, and producer, Tate’s powerful style and investment in African American cultural production helped to elevate hip-hop and street art to the level of jazz and Abstract Expressionism. Tate’s writing exploded onto the New York cultural scene in the 1980’s when he began contributing freelance reviews on Black music and art to the alternative news and culture weekly, The Village Voice. His tastes varied widely as did his style of writing, which combined pop culture and its effects with French literary theory and his first book Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (1992) catalyzed a young generation of writers of color with its powerful language, kaleidoscopic range, and easy erudition. Sanford Biggers’ has dedicated the presentation of this exhibition at the Speed Museum to the memory of Tate, who died at the age of 64 on December 7, 2021.

The Underground Railroad (noun): The use of quilts-as-signposts and the belief that during the antebellum period, runaway slaves relied on a network of signals conveyed in the design and display of quilts, which carried encoded messages, remains a fraught and contested subject for historians. Academic and textile historians have found no written, oral, or material sources to confirm the hypothesis that the coded messages were created and transferred into quilts. While some historians such as Cuesta Benberry note that “signals-to-slaves” stories were orally transmitted and that in cultures that favor “the written word,” oral traditions are often pitched against textual ones, others, such as Dr. Henry Louis Gates’s has noted that the relationship is more “mythology,” echoing the African American quilt historian Carolyn L. Mazloomi’s statement that “There is no proof. It’s a wonderful romantic story, but there’s no proof.”