Artist: Sanford Biggers
Title: Somethin’ Close to Nothin’, 2019
Medium: Paint on Antique Quilt
Location: Miami Beach Convention Center, East Lobby
Miami Beach Legacy Art Purchase (2020)
As announced on November 4, 2019, the City of Miami Beach launched the Legacy Purchase Program, a collaboration with Art Basel Miami Beach, and under the direction of the City’s Art in Public Places (“AiPP”) committee whereby the City would set out to purchase a work of art from contingency funds from the AiPP collection within the Miami Beach Convention Center campus. The goal of the program is to strengthen the connection between the City of Miami Beach, the residents and Art Basel Miami Beach by allowing the residents to be a part of the curatorial process of our public art collection, while broadening our dedication to acquiring meaningful public art and expanding our relationship with Art Basel by enhancing our community engagement in the annual event.
Sanford Biggers’ works integrate film/video, installation, sculpture, drawing, original music and performance. He intentionally complicates issues such as hip hop, Buddhism, politics, identity and art history in order to offer new perspectives and associations for established symbols. Through a multi-disciplinary formal process, and an equally syncretic creative approach, he makes works or “vignettes” that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are conceptual.
Sanford Biggers was born in Los Angeles, CA and lives and works in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; the Brooklyn Museum; Sculpture Center, NY; and Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL, among numerous others. His work has been exhibited in institutions including Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London; Whitney Museum of American Art; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, as well as institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland and Russia. The artist’s works have been included in several notable exhibitions including: Prospect 1/ New Orleans Biennial; Illuminations at the Tate Modern; Performa 07 in NY; The Whitney Biennial; and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Biggers’ awards include The Rome Prize; The Creative Time Travel Grant; Creative Capital Project Grant; New York Percent for the Arts Commission; Art Matters Grant; New York Foundation for the Arts Award; the Lambent Fellowship in the Arts; the Pennies From Heaven/ New York Community Trust Award; Tanne Foundation Award; Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award Grant; James Nelson Raymond Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and a Camille Hanks-Cosby Fellowship. He has participated in prestigious residencies and fellowships including: Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California; ARCUS Project Foundation, Ibaraki, Japan; and the Art in General/ Trafo Gallery Eastern European Exchange in Budapest, Hungary. He has been a fellow of the Socrates Sculpture Park Residency; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views AIR Program; the Eyebeam Atelier Teaching Residency; the Studio Museum AIR Program; the P.S. 1 International Studio Program; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency.
