Sanford Biggers: drift presents the acclaimed artist’s first major solo museum exhibition on the East End of Long Island, featuring new textile works, prints, sculptures and site-responsive installations. Fascinated by the ways that materials and symbols become charged with spiritual, cultural, and personal significance, Biggers (b. 1970, Los Angeles, CA) draws on a diverse range of influences, ranging from Buddhism and Los Angeles graffiti culture to Gee’s Bend quilts and his own collection of African sculpture. Working in painting, installation, sculpture, video, and performance, Biggers describes his practice as emerging from an aggregate process of “transposing, combining, and juxtaposing ideas, forms, and genres that challenge traditional historiography.”

Sanford Biggers: drift traces the multidisciplinary nature of Biggers’ work through the motif of the cloud, a symbol that has engaged the artist for decades. Controlled by the unseen energy of the wind, these nebulous forms are shaped and re-shaped by air currents as they move across the sky. Themes of fluctuation and adaptability run throughout the exhibition, beginning with the artist’s recent monumental installation Unsui (Cloud forest) (2025), a series of illuminated cloud sculptures that draw on Japanese, European, and American art traditions and will be suspended from the largest gallery’s arched ceiling. Inspired by his time spent in Japan in the early 1990s, the work’s title is taken from a Japanese term that likens the drifting nature of clouds to the Zen Buddhist philosophy of moving through the world without attachment or resistance to change.

The exhibition will also feature examples from Biggers’ ongoing Codex series—sculptures and paintings made from repurposed antique quilts—that feature spray-painted cumulus cloud forms, a nod to Biggers’ teenage years as a graffiti artist. The Codex works reference the legend of “quilt codes,” said to have guided freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad; though historians have debated this narrative, it remains a potent metaphor for perseverance and liberation. A new three-dimensional wall piece and a woven tapestry represent additional styles in his Codex series and trace the evolution of Biggers’ practice over time.

In an adjacent gallery, Biggers will create a new site-specific floor-based sand installation inspired by the form and function of prayer rugs, portable breakdance floors, and Japanese Buddhist mandalas. Beginning as a complex geometric pattern, the work’s ephemeral surface will be intentionally altered in a performance that will disrupt the design’s hard edges to painterly effect and create what Biggers refers to as a “blur.” Building on the exhibition’s exploration of movement and transformative forces, this blur will also be echoed in his new Codex work, in which the textile’s quilted pattern will appear rippled, as though disturbed by a current of air. Placed in the middle of the sand installation will be Mirror, a marble sculpture from his ongoing Chimera series, which blends elements of African masks and Greco-Roman statuary, combining references to various figurative sculpting traditions as a way to bring into conversation diverse histories traditionally considered in isolation.