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 artists and 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. MASK Consortium creates strategic partnerships with museums, universities, state and local governments, corporations, and individuals who share MASK’s goal of fostering connection through cultural preservation and access.
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 a partner at MASK Consortium. He is the founder of the Marksmen, a network of musicians creating original compositions and scoring for video games, films, and commercials. Mark is also a member of MoonMedicin, a performance art soundsystem that has challenged the traditional landscape of music venues, galleries, museums, and university campuses with provocative experiences since 2011. His formal discipline is Computer Science, which he studied with a concentration in Music at Princeton University.
Alicia H. Hines is a partner at MASK Consortium. She taught English and was an academic dean at Horace Mann School in the Bronx for more than 15 years. Alicia writes about race, gender, public space, literature and art. With Dr. Alondra Nelson and Thuy Nguyen Tu, she co-edited of a collection of essays titled Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, published by NYU Press. Alicia is the former owner and operator of likkle jamaican dumpling house & library, a restaurant, community lending library and cultural destination in Brooklyn, New York.
My function at MASK is in some ways like Dubois’ as director of publicity and research for the NAACP (and that he was a founding member of the organization). In the practical sense it means introducing myself to artists whose work I appreciate as well as collectors and curators who share that appreciation, visiting galleries and museums with a mind toward developing exhibitions and programming, increasing my knowledge about and love for art through research, and writing grant proposals for some of the artists and organizations we collaborate with to fund the technical and very expensive aspects of artmaking as it relates to fabrication, digital scanning and archiving. In particular, I seek out opportunities and create proposals for initiatives that invite members of overlooked and underserved communities to document their individual stories and cultural artifacts—memorabilia and other keepsakes possessed by regular folk might someday be lost to a hoard, dispossession, or other damage, despite their provenance and worthiness for digital capture. As the preservation of our shared histories and cultural memory is vital, museums as the civic custodians of such artifacts have a number of responsibilities to the larger community, foremost being access.
Guy Routte is a member of the MASK Consortium. His Baltimore based agency, SCHMTCS, LLC, specializes in creative content, music supervision, and artist engagement. Guy served as music supervisor for the 2020 Netflix release “The 40-Year-Old Version” and is currently working on the forthcoming Hulu series “Washington Black.” As a former A&R consultant for Columbia Records, Guy has helped to shape the careers of artists like Pharoahe Monch, hometown protégé rapper/actor Shyheim, funk outfit The Family Stand, Living Colour front man Corey Glover, the R&B group Goodfellas, and songbird Sara Devine. Guy is the co-director and lead producer of the re:mancipation documentary.