Sanford Biggers’s ‘Oracle’ is part of his Chimera series, which fuses African and European masks, busts and figures to explore historical depictions of the body and the myths, narratives and power dynamics embedded within them.
While classical Western sculptures and buildings are often viewed as pure white, recent scholarship suggests that ancient Greek and Roman artists used colorful pigments, marbles and stones to reflect the diversity of their societies. The stark whiteness we now associate with these works is largely a result of time, weathering, and, in some cases, the deliberate removal of pigments to conform with a whitewashed aesthetic.
The misconception of white as the original or inherent color in these works parallels the “black washing” of African art in the early 20th century. In Negerplastik (1914), Carl Einstein introduced African art to Europe but stripped the works of their original paint and adornments, presenting them in monochrome, devoid of social and ritual context. Later, artists from African countries reappropriated these art forms for Western audiences, further complicating their representation.
Such historical erasures and cultural misinterpretations have shaped perceptions of canonical artworks. While these misinterpretations obscure vital aspects of their histories, they also highlight the complex entanglement of Western sculpture with global traditions. Biggers’ Chimera sculptures challenge these distortions, confronting cultural hierarchies while acknowledging the layered, often ambiguous origins of their source material.
Through digital scanning and sculpting, Biggers reconfigures classical forms—merging male and female features, human and spiritual imagery—to disrupt conventional historical narratives and create new visions from the past. In ‘Oracle’, the seated body is modeled after sculptures from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, while the head draws inspiration from African masks and busts. Lotus blossoms on the throne conceal diagrams of slave ship holds, a recurring motif in Biggers’ practice.
For Biggers, remixing these flawed historical forms is a way to reclaim meaning: “You have a white-washed version of European objects and a black-washed version of African objects. Editing, cutting and pasting, chopping and screwing has been happening the entire time.”
Referencing mythologies and religions from the Yoruba to the ancient Greeks, oracles traditionally accepted offerings in exchange for divine favor. Drawing from this tradition, Biggers invites viewers to leave offerings—flowers, wishes and personal tokens—at the base of ‘Oracle’, transforming the sculpture into a site of communal reflection and ritual.
'Oracle' was commissioned by Art Production Fund in partnership with Marianne Boesky Gallery. It debuted at Rockefeller Center in New York in 2021 before traveling to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California, and, finally, to the Donum Estate.
Biography
Sanford Biggers is an interdisciplinary artist whose work blends narrative, history and cultural critique. Through his use of antique quilts, classical sculptures, sound, performances and video, he engages overlooked aesthetic and political histories using what he calls “conceptual patchworking”—a method of combining and reconceptualizing ideas to challenge traditional narratives and envision future ethnographies.
Biggers has exhibited internationally at prestigious institutions such as Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Centre of Pompidou Metz, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Whitney Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, LACMA, the Hammer Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His work resides in major collections such as MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.
He has received numerous awards and honors throughout his career, including the 2024 Art + Social Justice Award from the Bronx Museum, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Visual Arts, the Heinz Award for the Arts and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In addition, he was the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 2021-2022 Visiting Professor and Scholar in the MIT Department of Architecture and served as an Associate Professor of Sculpture and New Genres of Visual Arts at Columbia University from 2009 to 2018.
Biggers is also the creative director and keyboardist of the conceptual performance collective Moonmedicin and a recent GRAMMY Award recipient for his contribution to Meshell Ndegeocello’s The Omnichord Real Book, which was awarded the ”2024 Best Alternative Jazz Album.”
