“Sanford Biggers: Drift,” the artist’s first major solo presentation on the East End, will open Sunday at the Parrish Art Museum and continue through Sept. 13. The show will include new work and site-responsive installations alongside signature sculptures and textile works.
Born in Los Angeles and based in New York City, Biggers is fascinated by the way materials and symbols become charged with spiritual, cultural, and personal significance. He draws on a wide range of influences, from Buddhism to Los Angeles graffiti culture to Gee’s Bend quilts and his own collection of African sculpture.
Working across painting, installation, sculpture, video, and performance, he has described his practice as emerging from an aggregate process of “transposing, combining, and juxtaposing ideas, forms, and genres that challenge traditional historiography.”
The exhibition traces the multidisciplinary nature of his work through the motif of the cloud, a symbol that has engaged the artist for decades. Controlled by the energy of the wind, these nebulous forms are shaped and reshaped by air currents as they move across the sky.
“I am delighted to work with Sanford Biggers to create an ambitious exhibition at the Parrish this summer,” said Corinne Erni, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman chief curator of art and education and co-curator of the exhibition. “The different yet complementary elements of ‘Drift’ — highlighting both the unique materiality of his textile, painting, and sculpture work as well as the ephemeral and almost performative aspect of his room installations — will transform the museum galleries into something well beyond a viewing space and invite visitors to come together for contemplation and reverie.”
Themes of fluctuation and adaptability run throughout the exhibition, beginning with Biggers’s recent monumental installation “Unsui (Cloud Forest)” (2025), a series of illuminated cloud sculptures that reference Japanese, European, and American art traditions and will be suspended from the arched ceiling of the museum’s largest gallery. Inspired by time he spent in Japan in the early 1990s, the work’s title derives from a Japanese term that compares the drifting of clouds to the Zen Buddhist philosophy of moving through the world without attachment.
“As we look into the clouds, we often see very different things from one person to the next,” Biggers says. “I think that is similar to the way people perceive America. The ideals and values might be different from one person to the next — sometimes clearly visible, sometimes a little hazy or hard to find — but always worth looking for and striving for.”
“Cultural symbols and their coded meanings are at the heart of Biggers’s work,” says Scout Hutchinson, the FLAG Art Foundation associate curator of contemporary art, and co-curator of the exhibition. “Playing with the cloud’s myriad spiritual, emotional, artistic, and poetic interpretations, Biggers adds further undertones with his materials choices, rendering the symbol in everything from raw cotton and dripping paint to tessellated metallic surfaces that flicker in light and wind.”
The show includes examples from the artist’s ongoing “Codex” series, sculptures and paintings made from repurposed antique quilts featuring spray-painted cumulus cloud forms, which reflect Biggers’s teenage years as a graffiti artist. Those works refer to the legend of “quilt codes,” said by some to have guided freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad. While historians have questioned that narrative, it remains an important metaphor for perseverance and liberation.
Also on view will be a new site-specific sand installation inspired by prayer rugs, portable break-dance floors, and Japanese Buddhist mandalas. Laid out initially in a precise geometric design, the sand can be disrupted by its environment over the course of the exhibition, softening its edges and reinforcing the themes of movement and transformation.
“Of many waters . . . ,” Biggers’s 24-foot-wide by 16-foot-tall outdoor sculpture from 2022, will be installed in the museum’s South Meadow. Commissioned for the opening of a new building at the Orange County Museum of Art, the hybridized figure combines an archetype of a European reclining male figure with a 19th-century Baule double-face mask, a traditional African artwork, assembled from metal sequins.
Biggers, who has exhibited internationally, is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
