Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present Sanford Biggers, The Floating World, a complete suite of six prints produced in 2013 at the Neiman Center. This exhibition inaugurates a new gallery initiative dedicated to showcasing prints, multiples, and works on paper, expanding the gallery’s longstanding commitment to innovative contemporary art across media. With this exhibition, Fredric Snitzer Gallery launches a focused initiative to highlight prints, editions, and multiples—media that play a vital role in contemporary artistic practice while offering new points of access for collectors and audiences alike.
Sanford Biggers has received international acclaim for a multidisciplinary practice that engages themes of identity, spirituality, history, and race. In The Floating World, Biggers continues his exploration of quilt-based imagery, drawing on the belief that mid-19th-century quilts served not only as bed coverings but also as coded guides for enslaved African Americans navigating the Underground Railroad. These quilts, embedded with messages signaling safe passage and danger, serve as both historical reference and conceptual foundation for the series.
Recreating the tactile presence of handmade quilts, Biggers employs paper collage, stencils, screenprint, and spray paint to construct layered compositions that merge historical narrative with his own visual vocabulary. The resulting works vibrantly demonstrate how collective memory and historical events continue to influence contemporary thought and image-making.
Sanford Biggers (b. 1970) received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His honors include the Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, the Greenfield Prize at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the William H. Johnson Prize. He was also a finalist for the inaugural Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Arts. Biggers’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, and MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present Salvatore La Rosa: Durational Works, a solo exhibition by Miami-based artist Salvatore La Rosa. Marking the artist’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, La Rosa has produced a selection of powerful, multilayered oil paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, informed by personal experience and self-reflection. La Rosa’s works are likened to markers of time, with each piece worked and reworked over the course of many years.
For the past fifty years, La Rosa has consistently looked inward, producing dense, layered, and diaristic works. Through cutting, layering, building, and reworking, La Rosa’s technique imbues each piece with dense, raw, physical energy. La Rosa’s work explores personal history and daily experiences.
La Rosa remains part of Miami’s historical art narrative. His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale; Miami-Dade Art in Public Places; Southeast Banks, Miami; the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami; and Kent State University. Notable exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (1974); Trading Places, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2005); and Under the Bridge Art Space, North Miami (2025).
Salvatore La Rosa has lived alone for most of his life. His long-term relationship with solitary work is marked by quiet devotion, which is inscribed on the surface of each painting, sculpture, and work on paper. Every mark becomes part of an ongoing conversation with time, densely layered and accumulated like fragments of memory.
On the back of one work, La Rosa writes as if addressing it directly, explaining that he has “carried it forward” for as long as he could and that he must now “let it rest” for a while.
Salvatore J. La Rosa (b. 1941, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) holds an MA and BFA from Kent State University. After returning to Miami, La Rosa joined the faculty at Miami-Dade College North Campus, where he taught from 1967 to 2003, ultimately serving as Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Philosophy.
Fredric Snitzer first opened his gallery in 1977 on Biltmore Way in Coral Gables, followed by successive galleries at North Ponce de Leon, Bird Road, and Wynwood.
In 2014, Fredric Snitzer Gallery relocated to the Arts & Entertainment District near Downtown Miami.
Fredric Snitzer Gallery’s current space includes a 3,000 square foot indoor exhibition space, divided into two galleries, and a 2,600 square foot outdoor sculpture garden.
The gallery is committed to presenting work across all media including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance from a diverse range of contemporary artists, the gallery has maintained a rigorous exhibition schedule that features at least eight rotating exhibitions by its artists each year.
