John Thomas Biggers was born on April 13, 1924 in Gastonia, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children. He studied art first at Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1941, then was drafted into the Navy in 1943. After his discharge in 1945, Biggers followed his mentor Viktor Lowenfeld to Pennsylvania State University. There he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in 1948, and his doctorate in 1954.
In 1949, he accepted an offer to establish the art department at the newly created Texas State University for Negroes in Houston (now Texas Southern University). He would remain at the University for thirty-four years, until his retirement in 1983. While there, he established a mural program whereby each senior art student had to complete a mural on campus. One hundred fourteen of these murals remain at Texas Southern University. His own legacy there is a fifty-foot mural at the student center entitled Family Unity. Biggers' lithograph The Upper Room, from the Multicultural Art Print Series, is a detail from that mural.
John Biggers is best known for his murals, many of which are in Houston, including his well-known 1953 depiction of Negro women in American life at the Blue Triangle branch of the YWCA, which served as an inspiration for his drawings of Dicy. He produced the illustrations for Aunt Dicy Tales in 1955-1956 for his friend, author J. Mason Brewer, just a year before the artist's life-altering trip to West Africa. This trip inspired, among other things, Biggers' book Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa (University of Texas Press, 1962). Once Biggers had experienced his African roots by traveling to Ghana and Nigeria on a UNESCO grant in 1957, his art changed forever. The drawings of Dicy were the last commission in his early style. Biggers recognized these images as some of the strongest works he had ever done, spurred by his intent, expressed to Brewer, to bring illustration to a higher level of art.
In 1990 John Biggers was awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree from Hampton University. He died in January 2001, survived by his wife and sister.