Skip Navigation

QC #3

Sanford Biggers

Contemporary Art

Sanford Biggers’s quilt series recalls the supposed use of quilts sewn in specific patterns as signposts for slaves escaping along the Underground Railroad. He employs a complex system of imagery, including star maps, dance notations, and a Buddhist lotus composed of a slave-ship diagram, alluding also to Harriet Tubman’s famous reading of the constellations to find routes north.

Quilting represents an important artistic heritage for African American communities, including the peerless Gee’s Bend quilt-makers from rural Alabama, who in successive generations have worked continuously for nearly a hundred years.

Biggers’s monumental Blossom (2007)—a tree fused with a piano that plays the protest song “Strange Fruit” (see illustration below)—is now on view in the Rubin Pavilion as part of this exhibition.
MEDIUM Textiles and fabric treated acrylic paint on archival paper
DATES 2013
DIMENSIONS sheet: 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm) frame: 60 1/4 × 60 1/4 × 2 1/2 in. (153 × 153 × 6.4 cm)  (show scale)
COLLECTIONS Contemporary Art
ACCESSION NUMBER 2013.11
CREDIT LINE Gift of the artist
MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
CAPTION Sanford Biggers (American, born 1970). QC #3, 2013. Textiles and fabric treated acrylic paint on archival paper, sheet: 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 2013.11. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Courtesy of the artists gallery, CUR.2013.11_gallery_photo.jpg)
IMAGE overall, CUR.2013.11_gallery_photo.jpg. Courtesy of the artists gallery, 2013
"CUR" at the beginning of an image file name means that the image was created by a curatorial staff member. These study images may be digital point-and-shoot photographs, when we don\'t yet have high-quality studio photography, or they may be scans of older negatives, slides, or photographic prints, providing historical documentation of the object.
RIGHTS STATEMENT ©Sanford Biggers
The Brooklyn Museum holds a non-exclusive license to reproduce images of this work of art from the rights holder named here. The Museum does not warrant that the use of this work will not infringe on the rights of third parties. It is your responsibility to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions before copying, transmitting, or making other use of protected items beyond that allowed by "fair use," as such term is understood under the United States Copyright Act. For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch. For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright. If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org. If you wish to contact the rights holder for this work, please email copyright@brooklynmuseum.org and we will assist if we can.
RECORD COMPLETENESS
Not every record you will find here is complete. More information is available for some works than for others, and some entries have been updated more recently. Records are frequently reviewed and revised, and we welcome any additional information you might have.
Sanford Biggers (American, born 1970). <em>QC #3</em>, 2013. Textiles and fabric treated acrylic paint on archival paper, sheet: 60 × 60 in. (152.4 × 152.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 2013.11. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Courtesy of the artists gallery, CUR.2013.11_gallery_photo.jpg)

TAGS

TAGS