Sanford Biggers
Lenore G. Tawney/TSA Keynote Address
[Sanford Biggers’ talk was cancelled due to a family emergency. We are planning to reschedule an independent event with him in the coming months.]
Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Working with antique quilts that echo rumors of their use as signposts on the Underground Railroad, he engages these legends and contributes to this narrative by drawing and painting directly onto them. In response to ongoing occurrences of police brutality against Black Americans, Biggers’ BAM series is composed of bronze sculptures recast from fragments of wooden African statues that have been anonymized through dipping in wax and then ballistically ‘resculpted’. Following a residency as a 2017 American Academy Fellow in Rome, the artist recently began working in marble. Drawing on and playing with the tradition of working in this medium, Biggers creates hybridized forms that transpose, combine and juxtapose classical and historical subjects to create alternative meanings and produce what he calls “Chimeras”. As creative director and keyboardist, he fronts Moon Medicin, a multimedia concept band that straddles visual art and music with performances staged against a backdrop of curated sound effects and video. Moon Medicin performed at Open Spaces Kansas City in October 2018 and at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. in April 2019.
Sanford Biggers (b. 1970) was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York City. He is the recipient of numerous awards; in 2020 he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship; in 2018 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and in 2017 he was presented the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2012) and the Brooklyn Museum (2011), among others. His work has been shown in several institutional group exhibitions including at the Menil Collection (2008) and the Tate Modern (2007), and also recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017) and the Barnes Foundation (2017). In 2018, Biggers was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and in 2019 he was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame. Biggers’ work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Center, Minneapolis; the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; and the Legacy Museum, Montgomery, among others.
Julia Bryan-Wilson
Plenary Address
Friday, October 16th, 12:15-1:15 pm
Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at UC Berkeley; she is also the Director of the Berkeley Arts Research Center. She is the author of the award-winning book Fray: Art and Textile Politics (ASAP Book Prize, Frank Jewett Mather Award, and Robert Motherwell Book Award), and she co-curated the exhibitions Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen and Women’s Histories: Art before 1900. Bryan-Wilson’s research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian, among others. She is an adjunct curator at the Museum of Art of São Paulo, Brazil.
Jolene K. Rickard
Plenary Address
Saturday, October 17th, 12:15-1:15 pm
Jolene Rickard is an Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Studies Department at Cornell University, where she is also Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. As an art historian, artist, and curator, her work is focused on Indigenous art and material culture in a global context with an expertise in Haudenosaunee historic and contemporary art. Recent projects include the formation of a new journal on global Indigenous art with the Banff Centre for the Arts, partner in the Initiative for Indigenous Futures at Concordia University, and collaborating curator and artist for Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2019) and how the light gets in, Johnson Museum (2019). She was a co-curator for the inaugural exhibition for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC (2004), is a founding board member for the Otsego Institute for Native American Art History, advisor to GRASAC-The Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture, and serves on the editorial board of the American Art Journal. Rickard is a citizen of the sixth nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Tuscarora Nation.
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