Sanford Biggers’s Oracle reigns over Rockefeller Center (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
ART IN FOCUS
Channel Gardens, Rockefeller Center
Fifth Ave. between Forty-Ninth & Fiftieth Sts.
Through June 29, free
www.rockefellercenter.com
sanfordbiggers.com
oracle slideshow
Sanford Biggers’s monumental sculpture Oracle will continue to reign over Rockefeller Center through June 29. Weighing more than seven and a half tons and rising more than twenty-five-feet high, a bronze depiction of a mythological figure with an oversized head, holding a fiery torch in his left hand and making a symbolic gesture with his right hand. Wearing a swirling robe and sandals, he has a small lion at each of his feet, offering protection. His hair in the back falls into a ritual object. Oracle is a continuation of Biggers’s Chimera series, recently on view at Marianne Boesky, sculptures that explore classical narrative and power by reimagining traditional Greco-Roman and African sculpture and concepts of art history into something new. “The imposing figure of Oracle combines elements of an ancient depiction of Zeus with an Africoid mask-bust figure that’s a composite of several masks and busts from different African cultures,” Biggers says about the work, which evokes Simone Leigh’s High Line plinth Brick House and Kara Walker’s massive A Subtlety installation at the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory. Presented by Rockefeller Center in partnership with Art Production Fund, Oracle is part of “Art in Focus,” a series of site-specific works that previously featured pieces by Oliver Jeffers, Lucy Sparrow, Hein Koh, Hiba Shachbaz, and Lakela Brown, with Hilary Pecisk, Maurice Harris, and Lisa Congdon to come.
A former b-boy, breakdancer, DJ, and graffiti artist who was born in Los Angeles in 1970, the Harlem-based Biggers has been making politically charged art for decades, exploring racism, police brutality, and what it’s like to be a Black male in America. His 2020–21 exhibition “Codeswitch” at the Bronx Museum consisted of fifty quilts that delved into African American history and storytelling modes, while Blossom, now in its own space at the Brooklyn Museum, is a piano jutting out of a tree, playing an instrumental version of “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching made famous by Billie Holiday. Biggers, who also leads the five-piece band Moon Medicin, has created a special “We Are the Oracle” playlist for Oracle, which includes tunes by Raphael Saddiq, Brittany Howard, Stevie Wonder, the Isley Brothers, Prince, Radiohead, Charles Mingus, Donovan, and David Bowie that you can check out here.