© 2003, Sanford Biggers
On view
Theodora Walton William Walton III Pavilion
Tunic,
2003
Tunic takes inspiration from a work in the Museum’s collections: a plumed ceremonial cape made in twentieth-century Cameroon. The ceremonial cape is a feather-covered garment worn during a dance marking a young man’s initiation into a community of adult men. Biggers’s version is a puffy down jacket covered with a layer of feathers. The artist Terry Adkins, whose work is adjacent, wore Tunic in 2009 to perform a ritualistic dance of his own devising with musical accompaniment, transforming the jacket into a modern-day ceremonial object.
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Artist unrecorded (Bamileke), Cameroon Grassfields, Cameroon, Plumed tunic, after 1950. Synthetic fiber and feathers (African harrier-hawk, great blue turaco, and domestic chicken), 135 x 121 x 39 cm. Princeton University Art Museum. Bequest of John B. Elliott, Class of 1951 (1998-728)
More Context
Handbook Entry
Quotation and recontextualization are key strategies employed by Sanford Biggers, who repurposes traditions, rituals, and objects associated with both African Americans and Eastern religion. Commissioned by the Museum for the 2003 exhibition <em>Shuffling the Deck</em> and inspired by a ceremonial cape from mid-twentieth-century Cameroon, <em>Tunic</em> consists of a puffy jacket partially disguised by a layer of feathers. The meeting of these two very different artifacts sets in motion a collision with historical, geographical, and cultural ramifications. The urban meets the rural, while hip-hop mingles with traditional Bamileke dance. Biggers’s puffy, feathered jacket is also intended to underscore affinities: display, competition, and affiliation are only some of the connotations that it shares with the tunic.
More About This Object
Information
2003
- Carly Berwick, "Power spins: break-dancing b-boys and buddhist mandalas find common ground on Sanford Biggers's floors", Art news 99, no. 10 (2000): p. 224., p. 224
- Colette Copeland, "Through the photographic lens: the Whitney Biennial 2002", Photo review 25, no. 2 (Spring, 2002): p. 8-12, 23., p. 8-12, 23
- "Acquisitions of the Princeton University Art Museum 2003," Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 63 (2004): p. 101-141., p. 117
- Terry Adkins, et. al., Double consciousness: Black conceptual art since 1970, (Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum, 2005).
- Lorenzo Thomas, "Double consciousness: black conceptual art since 1970", ArtLies (Spring, 2005)., p. 104
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 315
