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Google links with artist Sanford Biggers to create a major outdoor sculpture for Loop headquarters

suntimes.com · 1h · first reportShare

The internationally acclaimed artist Sanford Biggers will create a 30-foot tall sculpture inspired by 19th century quilt patterns for Google's Chicago headquarters, the tech giant announced Wednesday. Called Vector, the angular, winding sculpture will be composed of glazed terra cotta panels — a contrast to the glassy and rounded headquarters and its now-muted exterior colors brought about by the building's current renovation. "The quilt is interesting to me because it is sort of the repository of American culture, in a lot of ways," said Biggers, 56, a Los Angeles artist who lived in Chicago while earning his master's at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1990s. Los Angeles-based artist Sanford Biggers Courtesy of Alex Freund "There's also rumored stories of [quilts] being used along the Underground Railroad as a coded symbol, but I'm also very interested in the geometry and the pattern and the craftsmanship of the objects themselves," Biggers said. "Vector is actually