Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present Sanford Biggers, The Floating World, a complete suite of six prints produced in 2013 at the Neiman Center. This exhibition inaugurates a new gallery initiative dedicated to showcasing prints, multiples, and works on paper, expanding the gallery’s longstanding commitment to innovative contemporary art across media. With this exhibition, Fredric Snitzer Gallery launches a focused initiative to highlight prints, editions, and multiples—media that play a vital role in contemporary artistic practice while offering new points of access for collectors and audiences alike.
Sanford Biggers has received international acclaim for a multidisciplinary practice that engages themes of identity, spirituality, history, and race. In The Floating World, Biggers continues his exploration of quilt-based imagery, drawing on the belief that mid-19th-century quilts served not only as bed coverings but also as coded guides for enslaved African Americans navigating the Underground Railroad. These quilts, embedded with messages signaling safe passage and danger, serve as both historical reference and conceptual foundation for the series.
Recreating the tactile presence of handmade quilts, Biggers employs paper collage, stencils, screenprint, and spray paint to construct layered compositions that merge historical narrative with his own visual vocabulary. The resulting works vibrantly demonstrate how collective memory and historical events continue to influence contemporary thought and image-making.
About Sanford Biggers
Sanford Biggers (b. 1970) received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His honors include the Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, the Greenfield Prize at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the William H. Johnson Prize. He was also a finalist for the inaugural Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Arts. Biggers’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, and MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.
