
Sanford Biggers
Sanford Biggers’s art fixates on recurring symbolstrees, carnival, musicians, and a bodiless smile that is part minstrel, part Cheshire cat, and part logo for a conglomerate whose name might be “history.” Two concurrent exhibitions with works spanning 2002 to the present explored these emblems vis-à-vis legacies of violence that constrain the powers and desires of black men. At times, Biggers’s ruminations sit uneasily inside a glamorized stagecraft. At best, grim knowledge makes his magic potent.
Biggers framed his Brooklyn Museum show not quite as a retrospectiveit is titled “Sweet