Black Art in Japan interviews multimedia artist Sanford Biggers, whose exhibition Sanford Biggers: Drift is on view at The Parrish Museum, New York, through September 13, 2026.
Born in Los Angeles, CA, in 1970, Biggers lives and works in New York. He examines the inherent tensions of history, culture, language, symbol, myth and narrative in a practice encompassing painting, sculpture, mixed media, video, music, and performance.
Biggers has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors throughout his career, including the Bronx Museum of Art’s Art + Social Justice Award, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Morehouse College’s Bennie Trailblazer Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the 26th Heinz Award for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome, and the deFINE Art Award from Savannah College of Art & Design.
What initially motivated your desire to go to Japan? Would you say both experiences shaped your early formation concretely?
I was inspired to move to Japan after returning from my junior year abroad in an art program in Florence, Italy. After graduating from Morehouse College, I immediately moved to Nagoya, Japan to begin teaching English with the JET Program. During the years that I lived there, I began studying Buddhism, practicing meditation, and finding my voice as an artist.
When I came back years later as an artist in residence at ARCUS, I was more mature in my process and I focused on developing projects that combined object making, performance and collaboration.
How did you first make the connection between hip-hop and Buddhism, and how did you go about deepening it? What in your background drew you to such a creative dialogue?
During that time, I became interested in creating a body of work that was deeply personal and perhaps even autobiographical, withomut focusing on any direct representation. Though paradoxical, I felt some experiences were so idiosyncratic that they may actually have relative commonalties with a large audience.
I grew up as a B-boy (breakdancing, DJ-ing and doing graffiti) and began studying Buddhism, mandalas, and Thangkas during my first stay in Japan. When I read about monks dancing in circles as a way of physically representing mandalas, I immediately recalled the discipline and ritual of practicing with my breakdance crew since the majority of our routines, formations, and moves were also based on the circle.
Museum of Arts and Design, New York; purchase with funds provided by the Collections Committee, 2018.5
And I’m curious to know about your relationship and understanding of Japanese Hip-Hop, J-rap, the beginning of the B-style…and how that’s changed over time. So much of your art involves movement and memory. How do you incorporate personal narratives and cultural identity into your work? Is there a specific artwork you created that encapsulates what “community” and “identity” mean to you?
My experience with Hip-Hop in Japan was very nuanced. As with rap culture around the world, it’s not just one thing. Some fans are into the fashion while others are into MC-ing, dancing, DJ-ing, or music production. Some are into all aspects of the culture.
I was very fortunate because my group of friends had a deep understanding of the root elements of the music, from its Jamaican sound system and DJ origins to the American jazz and soul influences, all the way to the turntable and speaker technology. In fact, their engagement with Hip-Hop inspired my interest in Buddhism, Shinto, taiko and ukiyo-e. I felt like there was a legitimate appreciation and exchange.
I’m aware that the Japanese interest in Black and other cultures is often seen as appropriation, but I feel that can be an oversimplification, much like “cultural identification”. Though cultural identification is a real thing, the gambit in my project has always been to make works that are purposefully not attached to any one specific identifier, but complex syncretic relationships between several abstruse identifiers. My work embraces this complexity as its narrative and an acknowledgement that none of us live, think, or act in strict binaries.
In your latest exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, on view through September 13, 2026, there’s your monumental installation Unsui (Cloud Forest), where your textile works are in conversation with illuminated cloud sculptures.
I’m struck by the way you mix pieces of African American history: quilts, which were used along the Underground Railroad as signposts; graffiti culture, which became an integral part of hip-hop culture; and clouds, which refer both to piled-up mounds of raw cotton, a lingering symbol of Black enslavement and sharecropping in the antebellum South, and to a Zen Buddhist philosophy comparing drifting clouds to a life lived without attachment or resistance to change. How do you conceive of this dialogue between the different mediums and cultures? And what are the narratives you’re hoping to convey through their interactions?
It’s funny, though I am deeply inspired by the idea within African American history of codes being embedded in quilts, none of the quilts I use are specifically “African American”. In fact, it’s almost impossible to track the true provenance of many of the quilts I use, but after I intervene on them, do they then become African American? Therein lies the gambit. I see myself as a conduit transforming the many mediums, processes, and references I use and their cultural implications. The work is extremely charged, as you’ve mentioned, but for me to pick one specific narrative denies the audience a chance to formulate myriad narratives of their own.
In Mirror (2024), a marble sculpture draped in textile, you bring together the Greco Roman sculptural canon and African mask traditions. In Adrift (2026), a site-specific installation made from coloured sand and inspired in part by Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas, the geometric pattern will be intentionally scattered at the end of the show. How do these two works speak to one another in relation to the reconstruction of history, impermanence, and the question of what—or who—is preserved, transformed, erased, or remembered?
Placing Mirror in the center of the large sand drawing is about the “chicken or egg” relationship of stone and sand and a nod to the forgotten presence of polychrome painted marble works throughout antiquity. We are taught that the classic marbles were mostly white or greyish monochromatic sculptures but modern research has proven that several were actually painted and embellished with vibrant colors that were abraded off by wind and the elements over time.
The colorful fabric draping over the figure’s shoulder evokes that tradition, while the placement of the marble sculpture within the sand acknowledges that over millennia, it too may return to sand or dust. In this sense, Adrift is about that conundrum and a reminder of the impermanence of existence itself.
Visit Biggers’ website: https://sanfordbiggers.com