Sanford Biggers
Just Us
New York City, 2021
Just Us features a clouded sky punctured with the words “Just Us” in a cutout-style font that reveals alternative views of more clouds. Just Us both evokes “justice” and highlights an unnamed group “us” suggesting the multifaceted and nuanced nature of the idea of “justice.” Here, the conflation of text and image questions notions of stability and consistency of meaning within language.
Local artists, Wendo Brunoir, a New Orleans native and Best in Show winner of Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s annual Louisiana Contemporary presented by The Helis Foundation in 2020, and JoLean Laborde, New Orleans visual artist, worked with Biggers to execute the mural.
About Sanford Biggers
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. Most recently, he was appointed the 2021-2022 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor and Scholar in the MIT Department of Architecture. In February 2021, he received Savannah College of Art & Design’s deFINE Art Award; in 2020, he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and appointed Board President at Sculpture Center; in 2019, he was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame; in 2018, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2017, he was presented the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts.
His traveling museum solo exhibition entitled Codeswitch opened at The Bronx Museum of the Arts from September 9, 2021, to April 5, 2021. This exhibition is a survey of over 50 quilt-based artworks and is currently on view at The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (July 28, 2021 – January 23, 2022). Codeswitch will travel from Los Angeles to Louisville, KY, to open at The Speed Art Museum on March 18, 2022. On May 5, 2021, he debuted Oracle, a monumental bronze Chimera sculpture, along with a multimedia public art exhibition throughout Rockefeller Center presented by Art Production Fund and Rockefeller Center in partnership with Marianne Boesky Gallery. 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 recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017) and the Barnes Foundation (2017). 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.
900 Camp St, New Orleans, LA 70130
