Summer festival installation: Sanford Biggers »Cheshire«

»Cheshire« refers to Lewis Carroll’s infamous cat from »Alice in Wonderland« who slowly disappears as he utters riddles or koans (Buddhist paradoxes) until only his bodiless grin remains. The Cheshire Cat is as invisible as images of professional black men often are in mass media today. The artist plays with the motif by drawing ambiguous parallels on the situation of the black man who, instead of hanging from trees (after a lynching), hangs out in them.

Sanford Biggers (*1970 in Los Angeles, CA/USA) creates multidisciplinary artworks that integrate film/video installation, sculpture, music and performance. Influenced by his experiences living throughout the United States, Europe and Japan, and by Buddhism, hip-hop and urban culture, Biggers’ work is known for its combination of meditative rigor and improvisatory edge.

Biggers’ installations, videos and performances have appeared in such institutions as the Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum, New York; Studio Museum, Harlem, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, as well as institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland and Russia. He has had solo exhibitions at Grand Arts, Kansas City; Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles; Triple Candie, New York; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Matrix/University of Art Museum, Berkeley, and Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw. He is the recipient of awards and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, New York Percent for the Arts, Lambent Fellowship in the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation.

Biggers is presently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Expanded Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is represented by Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles. Biggers is a 2007/2008 Solitude fellow.

The installation takes place under the auspices of the American Days in Stuttgart (June 26 – July 6, 2008)