John Biggers was the youngest of seven children born to his parents, Paul and Cora Biggers. His father died when John was thirteen. After her husband’s death, Cora Biggers took a position as matron in an orphanage for black children; John and his brother Joe were sent to Lincoln Academy, a boarding school that educated black students to be teachers and ministers.

After his graduation from Lincoln, John Biggers enrolled at the Hampton Institute, a black college in Virginia, with the aim of studying plumbing. During his freshman year, he began studying art with Viktor Lowenfeld, a Jewish refugee from Austria. Lowenfeld would serve as mentor and friend to Biggers for several years; after his discharge from wartime naval service in 1945, Biggers returned briefly for study at Hampton, and then followed his mentor to Pennsylvania State University, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. While at Penn State, he also married Hazel Hales.

In 1949 Biggers moved to Houston, where he became the founding chairman of the art department at Texas Southern University, then called Texas State University for Negroes. He held that position for thirty-four years. While at Texas Southern, he initiated a mural program for art majors in which every senior student was expected to complete a mural on campus: there are now 114 such murals on the Texas Southern campus. His passion for this art form was stirred by his deep immersion, while at the Hampton Institute, in the art of the American Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, and Harry Sternberg, and the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco.

The imagery of John Biggers’ art draws extensively upon his lineage as an American muralist; it was further broadened by his increasing connection to the art he found in traveling to Africa. In 1957, he made his first trip there, one of the first African black artists to do so. He and his wife traveled for six months in Ghana, Benin (then called Dahomey), Nigeria, and Togo in West Africa. The impact of this trip was extremely transformative, for his life and his art. In her book Black Art, Ancestral Legacy, Alvia Wardlaw wrote this about the art that evolved out of Biggers’ African journey: "That such glorious celebrations of the beauty and power of African culture were executed in the heart of segregated Texas is testimony to the enormous impact Africa had on this talented artist."

John Biggers retired from Texas Southern in 1983, leaving one last gift to accompany his enduing legacy. Family Unity, a fifty-foot mural in the student center, depicts the progression of birth, death, and the continuity of heritage. After his retirement, John Biggers devoted all his time to his art. He died in 2001.