Nari Ward (born 1963 in
St. Andrew, Jamaica) is an American artist based in New York City. His work is often composed of
found objects from his neighborhood, and "address issues related to
consumer culture, poverty, and
race
Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to:
* Race (biology), an informal taxonomic classification within a species, generally within a sub-species
* Race (human categorization), classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, and/or s ...
". He is a distinguished professor and head of studio art at
Hunter College
Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...
.
His awards include the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts in 2017, and the
Rome Prize
The Rome Prize is awarded by the American Academy in Rome, in Rome, Italy. Approximately thirty scholars and artists are selected each year to receive a study fellowship at the academy. Prizes have been awarded annually since 1921, with a hiatus ...
in 2012.
Early life and education
Ward was born in 1963 in
St. Andrew, Jamaica and moved to the United States at age 12.
By then, his talent for drawing was apparent, but according to Ward, his parents "didn’t know any artists or grow up around artists, so the artist was always the crazy guy on the outside and always broke," so he first studied advertising before changing his focus to his own art.
He completed a BA from
Hunter College
Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...
,
CUNY
, mottoeng = The education of free people is the hope of Mankind
, budget = $3.6 billion
, established =
, type = Public university system
, chancellor = Fél ...
in 1991 and a MFA from
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus.
Being New York City's first publ ...
, CUNY in 1992. In 2011, he became a citizen of the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
.
Career
Ward has shown in a wide variety of solo and group exhibitions. Ward was included in the 1995 and 2006
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in ...
s in New York and
Documenta
''documenta'' is an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.
The ''documenta'' was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultura ...
XI in Kassel (2003), and his works have been exhibited at the
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple na ...
,
the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the
Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, t ...
in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. His solo exhibitions include ''Episodes'' at the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts, which houses significant examples of European, Asian, and American art. Its collection includes paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts. It was founded ...
in Boston, ''The Refinery X: A Small Twist of Fate'' at the Palazzo delle Papesse-Centro Arte Contemporanea in Siena, Italy, ''Sun Splashed'' at the
Pérez Art Museum Miami
The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)—officially known as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County—is a contemporary art museum that relocated in 2013 to the Museum Park in Downtown Miami, Florida. Founded in 1984 as the Center for t ...
, and ''Rites of Way'' at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
In 2011, he had a solo exhibition at the
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing ar ...
entitled ''Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum''. His installation filled all of the museum's second floor and investigated transformative spaces that straddle the division between leisure and work.
[MASS MoCA – Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum]
/ref> In the previous year he exhibited in a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery and was part of ''Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Rotunda'' curated by Nancy Spector and held at the Guggenheim Museum
The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Museums in this group include:
Locations
Americas
* The Solomon R. Guggenhei ...
. Other exhibitions include ''Prospect.1'', New Orleans (2009); ''Whitney Biennial'' at the Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...
, New York (2006); ''Documenta XI'', Kassel, Germany (2002); a solo exhibition entitled ''Nari Ward's Rites-of-Way in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden'', Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, t ...
, Minneapolis, MN; a solo exhibition entitled ''Episodes'' at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts, which houses significant examples of European, Asian, and American art. Its collection includes paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts. It was founded ...
in Boston (2002); and a solo exhibition entitled ''The Refinery X: A small twist of fate'' at the Palazzo delle Papesse-Centro Arte Contemporanea in Siena, Italy (2006).
In 2022, his sculpture ''Peacekeeper'' was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Installations
Amazing Grace, 1993
Amazing Grace was first exhibited in a former firehouse in Harlem and then in 2013 at the New Museum
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
History
The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-named New Sc ...
in an exhibition titled "NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star." According to a review in '' Time Out'', the exhibit "resembles a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape of discarded baby strollers and fire hoses, all culled from the surrounding neighborhood by the artist"; according to ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', "Mr. Ward found all the abandoned strollers for this work on the streets of Harlem in the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis and a drug epidemic that disproportionately affected residents there." The exhibition is designed as a "room-size installation of baby strollers arranged so that you walk around them on a carpet of fire hoses, in a space lit like a church or mausoleum", according to ''The New York Times'', while ''Time Out'' describes the exhibit as "evok ngthe social cost" of "indifference" to landlord neglect that caused fires in minority neighborhoods and "characteristic of Ward's ongoing examination of race and its relationship to the urban environment."
The exhibition includes a rendition of "Amazing Grace" sung by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson
Mahalia Jackson ( ; born Mahala Jackson; October 26, 1911 – January 27, 1972) was an American gospel singer, widely considered one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century. With a career spanning 40 years, Jackson was integral to t ...
playing on repeat. Kirsten Swenson writes in ''ARTnews
''ARTnews'' is an American visual-arts magazine, based in New York City. It covers art from ancient to contemporary times. ARTnews is the oldest and most widely distributed art magazine in the world. It has a readership of 180,000 in 124 countri ...
'' that the strollers in the work "were arranged in the shape of a ship’s hull, in reference to the origin of the hymn, which was written by John Newton, an eighteenth-century British slave trader, after his conversion to Christianity during a storm at sea." As told to the Vilcek Foundation
The Vilcek Foundation raises awareness of immigrant contributions to the United States, and fosters appreciation of the arts and sciences. The foundation's flagship programs include the Vilcek Foundation Prizes, which recognize and support immigra ...
, "As a hymn about a slave trader begging for forgiveness and promising to change while caught in a storm at sea, the recording resonated with Nari, and allowed for a more hopeful interpretation of the installation."
Jeffrey Deitch
Jeffrey Deitch (pronounced ''DIE-tch'';Mike Boehm (January 12, 2010)L.A.'s MOCA picks art dealer Jeffrey Deitch as director''Los Angeles Times''. born 1952) is an American art dealer and curator. He is best known for his gallery Deitch Projects ( ...
assisted with the sale of the exhibition to Greek collector Dakis Joannou
Dakis Joannou (Leonidas Ioannou; el, Δάκης Ιωάννου; born December 30, 1939) is a Greek Cypriot industrialist and art collector. He is considered to be one of the leading collectors of contemporary art in the world and is famous for ac ...
, and it was later shown in 2004 in Athens and then Vienna in 2007.
Hunger Cradle, 1996
In 1996, Ward participated in the artist-run exhibition ''3 Legged Race'', organised in an abandoned firehouse in Harlem with two friends, the artists Janine Antoni
Janine Antoni (born January 19, 1964) is a Bahamian–born American artist, who creates contemporary work in performance art, sculpture, and photography. Antoni's work focuses on process and the transitions between the making and finished product, ...
and Marcel Odenbach
Marcel Odenbach is a German video artist. In the 1970s, with Ulrike Rosenbach and Klaus vom Bruch, he formed the producer group ATV. Odenbach's works criticize the conditions of German society.
Life and work
Odenbach was born in 1953 in Cologne, ...
. His installation ''Hunger Cradle'' "filled a floor with complex webs of rope, tubing, wire, and yarn, holding in suspension objects found on-site, including a crib, books, piano keys, and various tools", according to Kirsten Swenson of ''ARTnews
''ARTnews'' is an American visual-arts magazine, based in New York City. It covers art from ancient to contemporary times. ARTnews is the oldest and most widely distributed art magazine in the world. It has a readership of 180,000 in 124 countri ...
''. When the work was exhibited in the retrospective exhibition ''We the People'' in 2019, ''Gothamist
Gothamist LLC is the operator, or in some cases franchisor, of eight city-centric websites that focused on news, events, food, culture, and other local coverage. It was founded in 2003 by Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung. In March 2017, Joe Ricketts, ...
'' described it as "impossibly busy spider-web thick with trapped relics taken from an derelict Harlem firehouse."
Mango Tourist, 2011
To create ''Mango Tourist'', Ward "collected thousands of leftover electrical components and combined them with materials and themes evocative of other economic development projects", according to George Fishman of the ''Miami Herald
The ''Miami Herald'' is an American daily newspaper owned by the McClatchy Company and headquartered in Doral, Florida, a List of communities in Miami-Dade County, Florida, city in western Miami-Dade County, Florida, Miami-Dade County and the M ...
''. ''Mango Tourist'' is described by the Carnegie Corporation of New York
The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States, and later the world. Carnegie Corporation has endowed or otherwise helped to establis ...
as a work "in which gigantic snowmen made of yellow foam, discarded electrical parts, and mango seeds conjure the images of America as the magical place that Ward envisioned as a kid growing up in Jamaica," and by the ''Philadelphia Inquirer
''The Philadelphia Inquirer'' is a daily newspaper headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The newspaper's circulation is the largest in both the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley metropolitan region of Southeastern Pennsy ...
'' as "his gaggle of eight seared-foam, capacitor-bedecked, mango-seed-studded, 10-foot-tall figures .. a wry reflection on the shared lives of the Berkshire hills and sunburned Jamaica." In a 2011 interview with ''ARTnews
''ARTnews'' is an American visual-arts magazine, based in New York City. It covers art from ancient to contemporary times. ARTnews is the oldest and most widely distributed art magazine in the world. It has a readership of 180,000 in 124 countri ...
'', Ward discusses his use of snowmen in his work, stating, "Also: the label they always give me is 'the artist from Jamaica.' I’ve been living in New York most of my life, but when I go to Europe they're always calling me 'the Jamaican artist who lives in New York.' I'm like, 'Wait a second. I'm a New Yorker!' I like the idea of messing with expectations: 'Snowmen! He's from the Caribbean, isn’t he?'"
Breathing Directions, 2015
In 2015, Ward exhibited the installation Breathing Directions at the Lehmann Maupin gallery. A review by ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' notes, "African-American history is embedded everywhere. The colored patterns in the floor installation are derived from 19th-century African-American quilts. Perforations cut into the wall sculptures refer to the breathing holes found in the floorboards of churches that sheltered escaped slaves." A review for ''Hyperallergic
''Hyperallergic'' is an online arts magazine, based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded by the art critic Hrag Vartanian and his husband Veken Gueyikian in October 2009, the site describes itself as a "forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking ...
'' describes the inclusion of "symbols, which Ward encountered in a church in Savannah, Georgia, were created by punching holes in the floorboards, which enabled the escaped slaves once concealed beneath them to breathe — though not to breathe easy", when the series was exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri. With a $5 million annual budget and approximately 75,000 visitors each year, it is Missouri's first and largest contemporary museum.
Founders
The core of the museum's perm ...
in 2018.
In a 2019 interview with ''Artspace Artspace may refer to:
* Artspace (website), an online marketplace based in New York City
* Artspace, New Haven, an art gallery in downtown New Haven, Connecticut
* Artspace Mackay, Mackay, Queensland, Australia
* Artspace NZ, a visual arts cent ...
'', Ward describes a visit to the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia
Savannah ( ) is the oldest city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia and is the county seat of Chatham County, Georgia, Chatham County. Established in 1733 on the Savannah River, the city of Savannah became the Kingdom of Great Br ...
that was part of the Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early- to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada. T ...
, and how the floors included holes in the pattern of the Kongo cosmogram
The cosmogram was a core symbol of the Kongo culture. An ideographic religious symbol, the cosmogram was called ''dikenga dia Kongo'' or ''tendwa kia nza-n' Kongo'' in the KiKongo language. Ethnohistorical sources and material culture demonstrate ...
prayer symbol, that were used to allow air into the hidden spaces beneath where escaped slaves would hide; in the interview, Nair said, "I was really intrigued by the fact that these holes represented a history that was preserved yet hidden in plain sight. I wanted to use the pattern and figure out how it could relate to the present moment." According to Kirsten Swenson of ''ARTnews
''ARTnews'' is an American visual-arts magazine, based in New York City. It covers art from ancient to contemporary times. ARTnews is the oldest and most widely distributed art magazine in the world. It has a readership of 180,000 in 124 countri ...
'', "Police violence victim Eric Garner
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner was killed in the New York City borough of Staten Island after Daniel Pantaleo, a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer, put him in a prohibited chokehold while arresting him. Video footage of the inciden ...
's haunting 2014 cry, "I can't breathe," is also evoked by the panels."
Sun Splashed, 2015-2017
This traveling retrospective exhibition included ''The Happy Smilers: Duty Free Shopping'' (1996), after it had been in storage since its original installation, and was described as "a kind of time capsule, its everyday materials preserving obscure narratives of racial politics from the age before social media" by Kirsten Swenson of ''ARTnews
''ARTnews'' is an American visual-arts magazine, based in New York City. It covers art from ancient to contemporary times. ARTnews is the oldest and most widely distributed art magazine in the world. It has a readership of 180,000 in 124 countri ...
'', as well as ''Mango Tourist'', ''We The People'', and ''Afro Chase''. The exhibition also included ''Radha LiquorsouL'', a work where Ward used "an old neon liquor store sign upside down, lights up only the letters that spell "soul," and festoons it with fake flowers, shoe tips, and shoelaces", which "reads like a roadside memorial, and weighs alcohol as a killer against alcohol as a spirit and sacramental offering," according to Cate McQuaid of the ''Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
''.
Nari Ward: G.O.A.T., again, 2017
In 2017, Ward created an exhibition in Socrates Sculpture Park
Socrates Sculpture Park is an outdoor museum and public park where artists can create and exhibit sculptures and multi-media installations. It is located one block from the Noguchi Museum at the intersection of Broadway and Vernon Boulevard in th ...
in Long Island City, Queens, featuring concrete goats. The sculptures include rebar "jutting from the backs" of the goats, which according to Michael B. Farrell of the '' CS Monitor'', "In one sense, it's morbid", but according to Ward, is reminiscent of exposed rebar in buildings in Jamaica and other countries that allows further building development, and "When I see the rebar sticking out the roof, I always think about it as optimistic possibilities for the next generation."
Nari Ward: We The People, 2019
In 2019, a traveling installation opened at The New Museum
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
History
The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-named New S ...
, featuring "Amazing Grace" (1993), "Hunger Cradle" (1996), and "We the People" (2011), as well as smaller works such as "Trophy" (1993), Savior" (1996), "Den" (1999), "Glory" (2004), and "Spellbound" (2015). A 2020 review by ''The Denver Post
''The Denver Post'' is a daily newspaper and website published in Denver, Colorado. As of June 2022, it has an average print circulation of 57,265. In 2016, its website received roughly six million monthly unique visitors generating more than 13 ...
'' of the retrospective installation while it was at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA Denver), in Denver, Colorado, was founded in 1996 as the first dedicated home for contemporary art in the city of Denver. For seven years, MCA Denver occupied a renovated fish market in Sakura Square in lower dow ...
states "Ward's work has consistently examined the Black experience in America, specifically through the lens of physicality, of actual lives lived, and in that way it connects inescapably to the BLM
BLM most commonly refers to:
* Black Lives Matter, an international anti-racism movement and organization
* Bureau of Land Management, a U.S. federal government agency
BLM may also refer to:
Organizations
* BLM (law firm), United Kingdom and ...
moment, which itself is rooted in physicality, namely the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd
George Perry Floyd Jr. (October 14, 1973 – May 25, 2020) was an African-American man who was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit twe ...
, who died while in the custody of police officers on May 25."
Honors and awards
Ward is the recipient of numerous awards including the American Academy of Arts and Letters
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...
' Willard L. Metcalf Award (1998), Pollock Krasner Foundation grant[ (1996), The ]National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...
(1994), and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1992).Nari Ward – John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
/ref> He has also participated in the Studio Museum in Harlem
The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 W ...
's Artist-in-Residence program[ Ward has received commissions from the United Nations and the World Health Organization, and Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, ]John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim
John Simon Guggenheim (December 30, 1867 – November 2, 1941) was an American businessman, politician and philanthropist.
Life
Born in Philadelphi ...
, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation.
References
*-Come Together: Surviving Sandy. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2017.
*-"Icaboston.org." Nari Ward: Sun Splashed. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 April 2017.
*-"Installation Review: Nari Ward. Amazing Grace. New Museum." Digital Art Source. N.p., 6 February 2013. Web. 28 April 2017.
*-"Nari Ward: Bibliography ." Nari Ward. N.p., 3 February 2003. Web. 1 May 2017.
*-Sgarone. "Twenty-one Ten." Twentyone Ten. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 April 2017.
*-"In Past Show Nari Ward: Sun Splashed," at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Nari Ward , Mango Tourist (2011) , Artsy. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2017
External links
*
Lehmann Maupin
Nari Ward by Lee Jaffe
''Bomb
A bomb is an explosive weapon that uses the Exothermic process, exothermic reaction of an explosive material to provide an extremely sudden and violent release of energy. Detonations inflict damage principally through ground- and atmosphere-t ...
''
Nari Ward interview with Fawz Kabra, ''Ocula''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ward, Nari
Living people
Jamaican artists
1963 births
Hunter College alumni
Brooklyn College alumni
African-American artists
American artists
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alumni
21st-century African-American people
20th-century African-American people
Hunter College faculty