Most opinion is emotion in fancy dress.

—Joe Bennett

It was our first visit to the California African American Museum, in January of this year. That’s how I discovered the work of artist Sanford Biggers.

There was a room entitled Cassandra Press, part of the work of the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, which archives cultural material related to African American life. Sanford Biggers’ participation was as researcher, perhaps curator for the material presented in the room. There was a diverse array of printed matter, including an enlarged reproduction of what seemed to be the back of a piece of sheet music published by the Handy Brothers Music Co., Inc. in New York City. It was a list of “Negro Spirituals and Octavo Music”, including “Steal Away to Jesus”, which was the song I heard Patrice Turner sing, and so I took a picture of it.

There was also a paperbound book of material whose cover was a photograph of a famous hip hop musician meeting with an infamous American president in the Oval Office. That book and others contained an unannotated array of archival material that might have dated back more than 100 years. The effect of that room and those books was to overwhelm and confuse, which was the point, I think. There is so terribly much evidence, and how do we make sense of it?

In a second room, separated by a walk across the cavernous lobby (and past an exhibition space housing the powerful photographs and text of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Last Cruze, about the closure of an auto plant in Ohio), a large divided space presented Sanford Biggers’ Codeswitch.

I walked into Codeswitch, and my first reaction was to take offense. I saw that the artist had acquired antique quilts handmade by women and cut them, painted on them—destroyed them like so much nothing. That’s how I felt. I had to walk out of the space and re-enter.

When I came back a minute later, the work was saying something entirely different: this is what an artist must do. He or she cannot be bound by any constraints or hold anything precious, not even these precisely tessellated surfaces, household necessaries made from repurposed scraps, assembled meticulously, stitch by stitch, by women or collectives of women to keep their families warm and, according to the literature, aired on clotheslines, secret signs in plain view, along the routes of the Underground Railroad.

And these beautiful objects made by Sanford Biggers—cut and reassembled, trimmed and reshaped, stretched and reformed, some painted with diagrammatic conduits or Japanese-y symbolic structures suggesting waves or foliage, some appliquéd with indecipherable open figures and their shadows, or even embedded with QR codes linking to internet content—retain and expound on that insistent quality of signage, showing the way to freedom.

Cover image: Sanford Biggers, Pas de Deux, 2016 (from printed exhibition catalog)

Epigraph from the essay collection Fun Run and other oxymorons, by Joe Bennett, 2000.