John Biggers

Born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1924, John Biggers attended Hampton University and later Pennsylvania State University, where he earned a Ph.D. in education. From 1949 to 1983 he was a professor of art at Texas Southern University in Houston, serving as its department head and distinguished professor. When Ghana achieved independence in 1957, Biggers was among the first African American artists to visit, and his art was shaped by this experience.

Since the late 1950s, Biggers' paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture have drawn from and woven together both southern American and western and central African themes, social conditions and culture. Biggers has developed and consistently expanded upon several artistic strategies that combine elements derived from both sides of the Atlantic. In Biggers' work, the mundane speaks both to the experiences of African Americans and to larger, universal themes, often spiritual in nature. For example, a simple shotgun house, the home of many poor blacks in the American South, is transformed into a shrinelike symbol of sanctuary and community. Many of Biggers' later paintings and murals were organized around a complex, geometric framework and numerical symbolism in which objects incorporate African patterns such as those found on Kuba cloth.

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