For his two-part Intersections project, Mosaic, Sanford Biggers will produce a new body of work that connects art from the Phillips’s collection to his multidisciplinary practice bridging different cultures and histories.

For the main part of the project, Biggers engages with the Gee’s Bend quilts that The Phillips Collection recently acquired. Biggers has long been intrigued by the history and rich geometric patterns, colors, and rhythms of the quilts from Gee’s Bend, a small insulated African American community in Alabama with a long tradition of quilt-making. For Mosaic, Biggers will use colored sand to produce a site-specific floor installation inspired by the colors and patterns of the Gee’s Bend quilts displayed on the walls. The installation will also feature quilts made by Biggers—mostly acquired antique quilts on which he draws and paints, generating a vibrant visuals where past and present meet.

For the second part, Biggers will riff on sculptural works from the collection by artists including Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, A. R. Penck, and Markus Lüpertz, and create a large hybrid figure in marble that merges the expressionist aspects of European modernism with the narrative elements of African art, bringing another layer of cultural intersectionality.