![]() Women there have produced hundreds of quilts from the nineteenth century to the present. ![]() The tradition of quilt-making holds a significant place in American culture and has special resonance in Black communities, as witnessed in the quilts of Gee’s Bend- small, insulated African American community in Alabama that has produced hundreds of quilts from the ninteenth century to the present. This process, like linguistic code-switching, recognizes language plurality, as the quilts signal their original creator’s intent as well as the new layers of meaning given to them through Biggers’s artistic intervention. The Codex series includes mixed media paintings and sculptures done directly on or made from pre-1900 antique quilts. The title of the exhibition, Codeswitch, refers to both the artists’ quilt series known as the Codex series and to the idea of code-switching itself, or shifting from one linguistic code to another depending on the social context. He also created and circulated a “celestial map” documenting the city’s Underground Railroad sites in which Mother Bethel figured as the North Star. Inspired by those stories, he created his first quilt-based artworks for the Philadelphia project, hanging traditional-seeming quilts that visually engaged the church’s stained-glass windows. ![]() As Biggers researched the history of the Underground Railroad, he became intrigued by the long-debated historical narrative that quilts doubled as signposts along nineteenth-century escape routes. In 2009, Sanford Biggers was commissioned by Hidden City Philadelphia, a month-long cultural project, to produce a work for the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a stop on the Underground Railroad. For over two decades, Sanford Biggers has been developing a singular body of work that is deeply informed by African American history and traditions, and sustains a rich dialog with contemporary art on a national and international level, referencing urban culture, the body, sacred geometry, and American symbolism. ![]()
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