Part of an ongoing exhibition at Rockefeller Center, Sanford Biggers’ newest installation challenges the tropes of classical artwork
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SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
By Nora McGreevy
MAY 11, 2021
Through June 29, members of the public can visit (and eventually interact with) another monumental addition to the Manhattan landmark: artist Sanford Biggers’ Oracle, a 25-foot-tall, 15,280-pound bronze sculpture. Unveiled last week, the work depicts a person or deity with an enormous head who sits majestically on a throne in front of Rockefeller Center’s Fifth Avenue entrance.
Oracle is the latest entry in Biggers’ Chimera series, which merges European statues and African masks in an interrogation of sculptural art’s history and power, reports Sarah Cascone for Artnet News. The work is Biggers’ largest-scale Chimera commission to date, notes a statement from exhibition co-organizer Art Production Fund.
As Biggers tells Artnet News, he drew inspiration from the ancient Greek Temple of Zeus and African religious art, especially that of the Luba and Maasai cultures. Per the statement, the artist was also intrigued by ongoing scholarly conversations about the whitewashing of European sculptural history and “black-washing” of African sculpture. (In a separate statement from the Marianne Boesky Gallery, Biggers points out that Westerners stripped “hundreds of [African] objects … of all material adornment and any ritual and cultural residue” during the early 20th century.)
“The entire installation is based on mythology, narrative and mystery,” Biggers tells the Art Newspaper’s Gabriella Angeleti. “Rockefeller Center itself, as an architectural entity, is very much steeped in mythology and mystery.”
Tales from the Conspiratum 