The Gift of Tongues

Sanford Biggers | The Gift of Tongues features new work by Sanford Biggers, whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, film, collage, performance, and music. The exhibition brings together works from his Codex, Chimera, and Shimmer series, using antique quilts, marble, sequins, painted surfaces, and installation to reconsider entrenched myths and cultural narratives. Marianne Boesky Gallery, 507 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011. Runs April 30, 2026 — June 13, 2026. For this exhibition, Biggers transforms the gallery into a theatrical labyrinth of curtains, false walls, wallpaper fragments, and carefully staged sightlines. Within that environment, hybrid sculptural figures and quilt-based works create a shifting visual language shaped by African sculptural traditions, classical and neoclassical forms, Americana, and coded Black histories. Antique quilts play a central role in the exhibition, continuing a material thread Biggers has developed for years. In the Codex works, quilts function as layered supports that retain traces of earlier makers while receiving new painted and collaged interventions; in the marble Chimera sculptures, classical fragments are fused with African references to unsettle assumptions about historical power, form, and meaning. Across the exhibition, recurring cloud motifs and theatrical staging keep symbols open, unstable, and available for reinterpretation.