A conceptual artist with a background in music, Sanford Biggers moves seamlessly between sculpture, installation, performance, and video, offering meditations on global cultural exchanges. He often explores the cross-fertilization of African-American and Japanese cultures, best-illustrated in works such as his "rice drawing" entitled Black Belt Jones. With a keen eye for seductive, loaded materials — melting boom boxes, feather outerwear, and mandalas for break dancing — Biggers' aesthetic reverence for the mundane is as Duchampian as it is Zen. Biggers shares conceptual interests with David Ellis (a sometimes collaborator) and Juan Capistran, who both infuse hip-hop sensibilities into high art, commenting on the commercial appropriation of a subculture.

After growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Biggers spent time in Japan and Italy before settling in New York. His participation in the Clockwork 2000 group show at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the Freestyle show at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial plunged the artist into the New York scene. With projects from Beijing to London to Budapest under his belt, Biggers is now staging a three-part performance piece for PERFORMA 07. The Somethin' Suite is a contemporary hip-hop take on American minstrel shows, which turns a critical yet sympathetic eye toward the entertainment industry. Like Rebirth of a Nation by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and Kara Walker's cyclorama works, Biggers' project explores an archaic form of American popular entertainment to expose how the stereotypes it perpetuated persist in today's pop culture.

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