About Mask Consortium
In challenging times, people have turned to art in order to provide answers, or solace; to disturb the peace, or to promote change. Through art we can access information about who we are and the world around us, reflect on the past and the potential future.
MASK Consortium is a coalition of museums and educational institutions sharing knowledge. Its mission is to develop and promote a more complete understanding of human history and culture through the digital preservation of art and other cultural artifacts via 3D, 360 degree, VR capture. MASK develops curricula and programming for events, conferences, and symposia around said works of art. Moreover, we work to create strategic partnerships with museums, universities, state and local government, as well as corporations and individuals who share our goal of fostering connection and expanding knowledge through the preservation and exhibition of art.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which has meant the closing of large gathering spaces, MASK has enabled traditional venues—galleries, museums, event spaces– to safely re-engage their audiences via Virtual Immersive Exhibitions. Using cutting edge technology to capture each work, MASK also creates a digital record of the information around these works allowing the art to reach beyond these spaces and access a global audience. In recent months, we have collaborated with The Barnes Foundation, Bronx Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, the Cultural Museum of African Art (CMAA), The Chazen Museum of Art, Marianne Boesky Gallery, The Art Production Fund, and Brooklyn Museum of Art, to name a few.
We invite you to view our current and upcoming exhibitions and to consider partnering with us. We appreciate your work and your taking the time to learn about ours.
Alicia H. Hines, Founding Partner
MASK Consortium
New York, NY
MASK Consortium Advisory Board
Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings while examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often-overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Working with antique quilts that echo rumors of their use as signposts on the Underground Railroad, he engages these legends and contributes to this narrative by drawing and painting directly onto them. In his BAM series, Biggers seeks to memorialize and honor victims of police violence in the U.S., pointing towards recent transgressions and elevating the stories of specific individuals to combat historical amnesia. This series is comprised of fragments of wooden African statues dipped and veiled with thick wax and then ballistically ‘resculpted.’ Biggers then cast the remnants into bronze, a historically noble and weighty medium. Each sculpture is named and dedicated after unarmed victims who have died at the hands of law enforcement. The artist began working in marble after a residency as a 2017 American Academy Fellow in Rome. Drawing on and playing with the tradition of working in this medium, Biggers’ series entitled Chimeras creates hybridized forms that transpose, combine and juxtapose classical and historical subjects to create alternative meanings and produce what he calls “future ethnographies.” As creative director and keyboardist, he fronts Moon Medicin, a multimedia concept band that straddles visual arts and music with performances staged against a backdrop of curated sound effects and video. In 2022, Moon Medicin released their debut album, The Great Escape, on Third Man Records and have performed at the Lincoln Center of Performing Arts, New York (2014), Open Spaces, Kansas City (2018), and The John F. Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C (2019).
Sanford Biggers (b. 1970) was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York City. Biggers has been honored for his work with awards and fellowships. In February 2023, he will be honored by Morehouse College for the 2023 Bennie Achievement Award. In 2022, he was honored for his achievements by the Art Production Fund, Orange County Museum of Art and Studio Museum in Harlem’s Lea K. Green Memorial. In 2021, he was the recipient of 26th Heinz Award for the Arts; Savannah College of Art & Design’s deFINE Art Award; and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor and Scholar in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. In 2020, he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and appointed Board President at Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY. Biggers was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame in 2019 and received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2018. In 2017, he was presented with the Rome Prize in Visual Arts. Biggers was Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts from 2009-2019.
Through a commission from the Art Production Fund, Biggers presented, Oracle, a monumental bronze sculpture and multimedia public art installation at Rockefeller Center in New York City in 2021. Oracle will travel to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA on March 25, 2023. In 2022, Biggers debuted a 24-foot-wide-by-16-foot-tall multimedia outdoor sculpture that operates as a combination and continuation of Biggers’ Chimera, Shimmer, and Codex series at the grand opening of Orange County Museum of Art. His solo museum exhibition, Codeswitch, a survey of his Codex series of mixed-media paintings and sculptures made with antique quilts was presented at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2020); the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2021); and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY (2022). He has also had solo exhibitions at The Phillips Collection
(2021), SCAD Museum of Art (2021), Chazen Museum of Art (2019), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2012), and the Brooklyn Museum (2011), among others. His work has been shown in several institutional group exhibitions, including The Studio Museum in Harlem (2001),
Whitney Biennial (2002), the Menil Collection (2008), The Tate Modern (2007), Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017), the Barnes
Foundation (2017), Museum of Art & Design, New York (2020), Rubins Museum of Art, New York (2021), and The Centre
Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France (2022). Biggers’ work is held in the collections of numerous public institutions including the
Smithsonian, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, among others.
Mark Hines is the founder and creator of the live streaming platform, Virtual Live Experiences (VLE). He has also served as Vice President of Creative Technology at Russell Simmons’ 360HipHop.com where he was instrumental in the conceptualization and development of the new media platform. Upon BET.com’s acquisition of the startup, Hines was appointed Vice President of Strategy where he was directly responsible for initiating a diverse range of innovative projects including the conception and implementation of music strategies, interactive programming and creative technology. From 1994 to 1999, Hines worked at JP Morgan where he specialized in the development of unique technology applications that provided the bank with its competitive edge. While at JP Morgan, Hines maintained a music production company, Poisoned Ivy Entertainment, which did work for several major labels including Warner Brothers, MCA, Columbia and Def Jam, for which he received a gold record for the Belly soundtrack. Hines’ formal discipline is computer science which he studied with a concentration in music at Princeton University where he received his BA.
Alicia H. Hines, a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow, received her degree in English literature from Princeton University in 1995 and a Master of Arts in American studies from New York University in 1999. She writes about race, gender, public space, literature and art, and with Dr. Alondra Nelson and Dr. ThuyLinh Nguyen Tu edited a collection of essays published by NYU Press titled Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (2001). Hines taught English and was an academic dean at Horace Mann School in the Bronx for more than 15 years. She is the former owner and operator of likkle jamaican dumpling house & library, a restaurant, community lending library and cultural destination in Brooklyn, New York.
Guy Routte, SCHMTCS, Foundational Member
At the start of 2020, Routte rebirthed Schematics Industries, a multimedia operation with one simple goal: He wants “to build and create the blueprint for the type of content and media I want to see in the world.” On its plate are narrative films, documentaries and series, both web and TV, some that he’ll be writing and directing, including a docuseries about touring artists, that, in the time of coronavirus, has become even more relevant. Expect his signature on fine art projects, along with nontraditional record releases that incorporate striking visual content and presentations. Routte has shrewdly helped craft deals and shape careers of artists like rhyme whiz Pharoahe Monch, hometown protégé rapper/actor Shyheim, funk outfit The Family Stand, Living Colour frontman Corey Glover, R&B group Goodfellas and songbird Sara Devine, who he got signed to Columbia Records, where he served as senior A&R consultant. There, projects by Raphael Saadiq and Consequence fell under his watchful eye.
Eric Edwards, Cultural Museum of African Art, has spent more than half of his life amassing one of the largest African artifacts collections ever held privately, comprising approximately 3,000 items, which encompasses the 54 countries of Africa. His collection includes authentic pieces from African royalty, male and female secret societies, spiritual and ritual masks, ancestral figures, weapons, jewelry, reliquary pieces, adornment, musical instruments, fetish pieces, as well as utilitarian items of everyday life. He has held educational symposiums, seminars for children and personal exhibits to educate people of African ancestry and the diaspora of their heritage, that include tremendous contributions to the world dating back more than 4,000 years of human history. Edwards’ purpose is to educate through the stories told by each of the artifacts within his collection, detailing the cultural and technical gifts, skills, value systems and artistry. Currently, items from Edwards’ African art collection are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His goal is to ultimately create the Cultural Museum of African Art which will house his entire collection.