Sanford Biggers has a master’s degree in painting, but works as an interdisciplinary conceptual artist in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, audio-visual installations, performances, and music. His art touches on the disciplines of social studies, politics, economy, philosophy, and history. By working in all these disciplines, he finds flexibility, consilience, and allowances to plan, define, and shape the content. For Biggers, forms are multivalent, emphasizing the transformative power of art. By opening the artworks with a diversity of cultures, Biggers expands content to approach universality which allows for future ethnographies and to change mindsets from self-referential to openness.

His hope is that the conversations about black history and systemic racism become more nuanced, without the need to blame, but with the common need to strengthen American society. The work provides no answers but provokes better questions. His divergent thinking allows him boundless innovation and his Buddhist viewpoints allow him to remain wide open. Biggers uses his impulses to transcend borders, finding through research more universal and fundamental truths.

Lotus 2007 is a seven- and one-half foot diameter etched glass weighing 600 pounds and is an example of Biggers’ transcendence messaging. The lotus is a water plant whose roots bury themselves in the mud and whose bud travels through the depth of the water to blossom in the sunshine, into freedom. In Buddhism, the lotus is a symbol of transcendence, for purity of mind and spirit. He also designed Lotus as a memorial to the Middle Passage. A closer look at this work reveals drawings on each petal of cross sections of eighteenth-century slave ships taken from a British slaving manual Paying mindful detail to the 360-385 figures, the abolitionists used these illustrations of bodies lined up in each cargo hold to show the atrocities of slavery.

While Biggers was living in Germany, he kept hearing news from home each week about police abuse against African Americans. During his whole life, the media portrayed blacks as crying wolf, but now videos were being made and the entire world could see what was happening. Biggers knew what he needed to do to tell this truth. He used his collection of African figures, those he referred to as power figures, to stand in for victims of the shootings. He disfigured them with brown wax and named them after the victims. Using high-speed cameras, the “victims” were filmed as they were re-sculpted ballistically. The films are gut wrenching, and each shot feels on the viewer’s body as they link the figures to human life. After the shootings, Biggers cast some figures in bronze like BAM (for Michael—a nine-foot-tall bronze sculpture for Michael Brown housed at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Next to the sculpture is a film of his ballistic disfigurement.

Biggers’ musical group Moon Medicin is a combination mixture of his artwork as video installations in a minstrel type of way, both behind and mixed amongst the musicians. He coded them to eradicate historical amnesia and stimulate clarity of thought. His artwork appears as costumes and masks, disrupting traditional identity, politics, and spirituality. This is the place where the music and visual art worlds mash-up and throw away the rules to find freedom and afford the ability to create something new. There are porous boundaries between the audience and the performance. Rather than the solidarity of a tight soundscape thrust upon the audience, Moon Medicin improvises with the external data coming at them. The experience is ephemeral, in flow, and democratic. Biggers must stay vulnerable and be aware that anything can happen. This gives his improvisation an ecstatic quality.

Music can speak to an audience directly. It doesn’t need as much translation as visual art does and it can reach more people. Biggers feels he can tackle more issues. He believes this musical collaboration tool to be the third pillar of his practice. This interdisciplinary art blends to be integrative and interactive—yielding results outside traditional boundaries and in ambivalent territory.

Sanford Biggers is represented by David Castillo Gallery and Maryanne Boesky.

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