Chapter 3: The Great Afar

Back to The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project

LAND was proud to present the third chapter of billboards as part of The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, featuring the work of Sanford Biggers in New Orleans, Louisiana from April 5 to May 2014.

Biggers’ chapter of The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, entitled The Great Afar, was centered around his interpretation of Manifest Destiny as being both passive and active, wherein the concept evolves from a spiritual idea and manifest of our ambitions to a force that drives us to define our future. Beyond its poetic overtones, The Great Afar also referred to Biggers’ recent journey through the harsh terrain of the Afar region of northeastern Ethiopia. Biggers’ billboards documented the fragile (im)balance of northern expansion via the construction of new roads and highways through a region that has purposefully held on to its traditional nomadic lifestyle.

Sanford Biggers (b. 1970, Los Angeles, CA) is a New York-based artist who creates work thatintegrates film, video, installation, sculpture, drawing, original music, and performance. Biggers intentionally complicates issues such as hip hop, Buddhism, politics, identity, and art history in order to offer new perspectives and associations for established symbols. Through a multi-disciplinary formal process and a syncretic creative approach, he makes works that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are conceptual. His work has been exhibited in such venues as the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Prospect 1, New Orleans, LA; and the Tate Modern, London, England.

OPENING RECEPTIONS:
Friday, April 4, 2014
5-8pm
Hosted by PARSE (upstairs)
134 Carondelet Street
New Orleans, LA 70130

Saturday, April 5, 2014
7-10pm
Hosted by Tivoli & Lee
The Hotel Modern New Orleans
936 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70130

This chapter was made possible by LAND’s Nomadic Council and support from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Special thanks to Lamar Advertising Company, PARSE Gallery, Prospect New Orleans, Robin Wallis Atkinson, Michelle Kirk, Hotel Modern, and Rogers Mueller.