Born (1970) and raised in LA, Sanford Biggers currently lives and works in New York City.

His practice encompasses installation, film, drawing, sculpture, original music, and performance while reinterpreting recognizable social, political, and cultural topics. His work is visually compelling and conceptually complex, taking viewers on a journey from the initial aesthetic encounter through embedded layers of meaning to create what he terms, “a future ethnography.”

Seated Warrior is part of the artist’s ongoing BAM series responding to recent and ongoing occurrences of police brutality against Black Americans. The series of bronze works are made from wooden African sculptures that the artist collected, dipped in wax, and transmogrified with piercing bullets and then subsequently cast in bronze and accompanied by a video recording their “ballistic” sculpting. Seated Warrior, punctured by a single gunshot, expands the series beyond the recognition and remembrance of these tragedies into an exploration of the human condition and the desire for transcendence. His work speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings as well as to the historic context that bore them.

Conceptual artist and TED Fellow Sanford Biggers uses painting, sculpture, video and performance to spark challenging conversations about the history and trauma of black America. Join him as he details two compelling works and shares the motivation behind his art. "Only through more thoughtful dialogue about history and race can we evolve as individuals and society," Biggers says.

Recent solo exhibitions…

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
Brooklyn Museum
Sculpture Center
Work appear in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Barnes Foundation
Tate Britain and Tate Modern
Whitney Museum
Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

as well as institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland and Russia.

Awarded the prestigious Rome Prize in Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome, 2017.