Artista

Sanford Biggers

The quilt, the quintessential vernacular object, has proven to be rich ground for what Biggers calls “material storytelling.” The scope of his quilting work is to shed new light on his long-standing concerns such as racial experience, American violence, Buddhism and art history, and reveal inner dimensions of his personal journey.

Biggers made his first two quilted works in 2009, installing them at the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. One of the vintage quilts had a floral pattern; the other was checked. On each, he transposed the locations of the church and safe houses of the Underground Railroad from a historical map, marked as stars in a constellation, and connected them with charcoal and oil stick. The main reference in these works is to a theory that holds that people along the Underground Railroad shared crucial information in code through quilts hanging from safe houses and other passageways. Scholars have found little proof of validation, but for Biggers the very fact of popular knowledge, even when it is apocryphal, has value in itself: “It is more important that history endure.”