This spring, multiple disciplinary artist Sanford Biggers will transform Rockefeller Center with several public art exhibitions, including the highly anticipated monumental Oracle sculpture. Presented by Art Production Fund and Rockefeller Center, in partnership with Marianne Boesky Gallery, and several years in the making, Biggers will be the first artist invited by Rockefeller Center for a multimedia survey exhibition campus-wide from May 5th to June 29th, 2021.
The bronze sculpture titled Oracle, commissioned by Art Production Fund for ins-tallation at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Channel Gardens, is the cornerstone of Biggers’ takeover and welcomes visitors to the installation. Oracle is a continuation of Biggers’ recent Chimera sculptures, a series of figurative sculptures created by combining African masks and European figures that explore historical depictions of the body and their subsequent myths, narratives, perceptions, and power. This sculpture will be the artist’s largest-scale commission to date.
Biggers is intrigued by the recent scholarship about the academic and historical “white-washing” of classical Greco-Roman sculpture simultaneously intersecting with the early twentieth century “black-washing” of various African sculptural objects. The Chimera sculptures specifically challenge the associated cultural and aesthetic assumptions about their source material while acknowledging the often-dubious origins of the original objects themselves.