Sanford Biggers: Of many waters… at OCMA

October 8, 2022 – August 13, 2023
For over two decades, Los Angeles native and New York-based artist Sanford Biggers has been working across mediums to weave our understanding of narrative, perspective, and history into broader contexts. Commissioned for the opening of OCMA’s new building, Of many waters… (2022) is a 24-foot-wide-by-16-foot-tall multimedia outdoor sculpture that operates as a combination and continuation of Biggers’s Chimera, Shimmer, and Codex series. A hybridized figure, the sculpture combines an archetype of a European reclining male figure with a 19th-Century Baule double-face mask assembled from metal sequins. The new commission is Biggers’s first Chimera-Shimmer hybrid—a new form that the artist considers “an object for future ethnography”—and the largest sequined work he has made to date. In addition to the complex networks of historical references that course through this work, the Biggers’s traces connections to antiquity, non-Western cultures, and traditions, including Buddhism’s sacred geometry.