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At Marianne Boesky, Sanford Biggers Rewrites the Rules of Material Storytelling

"The Gift of Tongues" transforms the gallery into a labyrinthine stage where quilts, sculptures and 'power objects' collapse the distance between past, present, physical reality and myth.

Operating at the intersections of African diasporic history, spirituality, mythology and popular culture, artist Sanford Biggers has long applied strategies of appropriation and transformation to engage creatively and semiotically with systems of power, race and historical narration. For his latest exhibition at Marianne Boesky, Biggers went all in, staging an immersive, psychedelic choreography articulated through quilt-based two-dimensional works, layered canvases and eclectic sculptural assemblages drawing from multiple iconographies and cultures. In an early walkthrough, just as he was finishing installing the show, Biggers described the exhibition as both a return to immersive installation-making and an expansion of concerns that have shaped his practice for years: “I wanted to create an atmosphere here that felt less like walking into a white cube with artwork and more like entering a full enveloping environment— a world where things change scale and have their own context.” He conceived the gallery space as a stage, where the exhibition unfolds fluidly like a play in three or four acts. “As you walk in, it sets the stage for a journey. The viewer becomes part of the unfolding story,” he adds.

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"THE GIFT OF TONGUES" Artist: Sanford Biggers Venue: Marianne Boesky Gallery Address: 507 West 24th Street, New York Runs through: June 13, 2026

The gallery has become an intricate theatrical labyrinth and Gesamtkunstwerk of strategically placed curtains and false walls, where new works from his Codex, Chimera and Shimmer series emerge like fragmented vignettes, inviting visitors to move through a tangled web of historical assumptions and slippery symbols—a patchwork of mutable archetypes that remains perpetually open to reinterpretation. Here, Biggers operates through a deliberately hybrid practice that combines painting, sculpture, textiles, video, performance, sound and archival material, creating collisions between materials, histories and symbolic systems that layer African diasporic traditions with American popular culture, Buddhism, jazz improvisation and postminimalist abstraction.

“The Gift of Tongues” is a fluid, idiosyncratic and multimedia crossing of histories and creative symbolic expressions, all seemingly converging in a simultaneously imaginative and spiritual pull toward transcendence beyond earthly, time-bound reality. Symbols and signifiers from different cultures slip fluidly into the space, embracing multiple meanings and readings, enriched at each passage and altered again through the cultural transmission and exchange that have built our global symbolic vocabulary.

“Each work relies on the history embedded in these materials, especially the quilts, but the titles also suggest........

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