Saturday, December 5th
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time
Sanford Biggers and Textile Society of America team up for a private walkthrough of his solo exhibition Codeswitch currently on view at The Bronx Museum of the Arts to discuss his “Codex” series.
This event is free to all who registered for the 2020 Symposium, due to the cancellation of Biggers’ keynote address. Those who did not attend the Symposium are also invited to join for a $10 registration fee. Please log in to your account to access the free ticket. If you are not a TSA member, but did attend the symposium, you will still be able to log in but will need to request a password.
Event Description:
“Codex” is a manuscript or a repository of writings, observations, ancient annals, and ideas. It is also the title of the ongoing series of textile-based artworks that comprise Sanford Biggers’ traveling monographic exhibition, Codeswitch. Inspired by the long-debated historical narrative that quilts doubled as signposts along Underground Railroad escape routes throughout the 19th century, “Codex” explores Sanford Biggers’ mixed media paintings, drawings, assemblages, and sculptures done directly on or made from pre-1900s antique quilts. This process, like social and linguistic code-switching, recognizes material and temporal 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.
Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch is a joint collaboration between The Bronx Museum of the Arts and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, New Orleans, overseen by Sergio Bessa (Bronx Museum Curator) and Andrea Andersson, (Founding Director and Chief Curator, Rivers Institute). After closing at The Bronx Museum of the Arts on January 24, 2021, Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch will be on view at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from March 26 to September 12, 2021. It will then travel to the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans from October 20, 2021 to January 23, 2022. The catalog, co-published with Yale University Press, features essays by the curators Sergio Bessa and Andrea Andersson along with guest writers, documenting the entire series of quilts produced by the artist. The book includes a forward by Gregory Tate and a 20-page graphic work by John Jennings in collaboration with David Brame and Esperanza Bey.
His solo show Soft Truths, which features new quilt-base artworks and marbles, is currently on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York until December 12, 2020.
If you would like to preview the exhibition, please visit the 3D Walkthrough here: https://maskconsortium.com/sanfordbiggers/
Click here to read Sanford Biggers’ bio.
