April 8, 2025 | 6:30 PM
Sayles Hall Auditorium
Free | Suggested Reservation

Join renowned artist Sanford Biggers (b. 1970, Los Angeles, CA) for an evening of conversation inspired by his major new public art installation Unsui (Cloud Forest), 2025 on view in Brown University’s Sayles Hall through December 2025. Thea Quiray Tagle, Associate Curator at The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, will join Biggers in a discussion about this large-scale commission inspired by his long interest in the global art history of depicting clouds as decorative and conceptual elements.

Sanford Biggers was invited to create a temporary public installation at Brown by artist Carrie Mae Weems, whose fall 2023 campus-wide project Varying Shades of Brown featured her installations at the David Winton Bell Gallery and List Lobby Gallery in the List Art Center; Cohen Gallery in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts; and the Main Hall and Attanasio Family Promenade of the new Lindemann Performing Arts Center.

Sanford Biggers

Born: 1970, Los Angeles, CA
Live/Work: New York City

Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current happenings while examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often-overlooked aesthetic, cultural, historical, and political narratives through his use of antique quilts and textiles, classical sculptures from around the world, sonic interventions, performances, and video. Biggers describes his process as “conceptual patchworking,” a method of transposing, combining, and juxtaposing ideas, forms, and genres that challenge traditional historiography, provenance, and official narratives to create artworks for a future ethnography.

Biggers’ work has been exhibited internationally and nationally in prestigious institutions, including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Centre of Pompidou Metz, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California African American Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, and Bronx Museum of Art. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum,the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors throughout his career, including the 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. He was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design. In addition, he was the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 2021-2022 Visiting Professor and Scholar in the MIT Department of Architecture and served as an Associate Professor of Sculpture and New Genres of Visual Arts at Columbia University from 2009 through 2018. 

Biggers is the creative director and keyboardist of the conceptual performance collective Moonmedicin and a recent GRAMMY recipient for his contribution to Meshell Ndegeocello’s The Omnichord Real Book, which was awarded the ”2024 Best Alternative Jazz Album.”

Thea Quiray Tagle

Associate Curator, Adjunct Lecturer

Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD (she/her) is a Filipinx femme curator, writer, and transdisciplinary scholar invested in socially engaged art, site-specific performance, and photographic histories of violence across the Pacific. Her research and writing has been published in venues including American Quarterly, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Hyperallergic, and BOMB Magazine. Dr. Quiray Tagle is the Associate Curator of the Bell Gallery and Brown Arts Institute (BAI) at Brown University; while at Brown, she has organized residencies and solo exhibitions with Autumn Knight + SA Smythe (THEYFXRST), Barbara T. Smith, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, and Julie Tolentino. As an independent curator, Thea co-curated New York Now: Home (2023), the inaugural contemporary photography triennial at the Museum of the City of New York, and has curated performance and visual art exhibitions for institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Vachon Gallery at Seattle University; and the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries.