This spring, multidisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers will transform Rockefeller Center with several public art exhibitions, including the highly anticipated monumental sculpture Oracle. Presented by the Art Production Fund and Rockefeller Center, in partnership with Marianne Boesky Gallery and in production for several years, Biggers will be the first artist invited by Rockefeller Center for a multimedia retrospective exhibition throughout the complex from May 5 to June 29, 2021.
The bronze sculpture titled Oracle, commissioned by the Art Production Fund for installation at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the Channel Gardens, is the cornerstone of Biggers’ occupation 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 representations 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 recent academic research on the academic and historical “whitening” of classical Greco-Roman sculpture, which simultaneously intersects with the “blackening” of various African sculptural objects in the early 20th century. The Chimera sculptures specifically challenge the cultural and aesthetic assumptions associated with their material origins while acknowledging the often dubious origins of the original objects themselves.