Nari Ward

Nari Ward (born 1963 in St. Andrew, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-American artist based in New York City. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Hunter College. His work is often composed of found objects from his neighborhood, and "address issues related to consumer culture, poverty, and race". His awards include the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts in 2017, and the Rome Prize in 2012. 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, CUNY in 1991 and a MFA from Brooklyn College, CUNY in 1992. In 2011, he became a citizen of the United States.

Career Ward has shown in a wide variety of solo and group exhibitions. Ward was included in the 1995 and 2006 Whitney Biennials in New York and Documenta XI in Kassel (2003), and his works have been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. His solo exhibitions include Episodes at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 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, 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 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. 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. Other exhibitions include Prospect.1, New Orleans (2009); Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 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, Minneapolis, MN; a solo exhibition entitled Episodes at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 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).

His work Homeland Sweet Homeland (2012) is included in the permanent collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami, where Ward had a major mid-career retrospective in 2015. The exhibition Nari Ward: Sun Splashed commented on citizenship, migration, racial and national identity through objects and installations. The show traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston later on.

In 2022, his sculpture Peacekeeper was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Nari Ward is represented by Lehman Maupin, New York.

Installations

Amazing Grace, 1993 Amazing Grace was first exhibited in a former firehouse in Harlem and then in 2013 at the New Museum in an exhibition titled "NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star." 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,

Jeffrey Deitch assisted with the sale of the exhibition to Greek collector Dakis Joannou, and it was later shown in 2004 in Athens and then Vienna in 2007. When the work was exhibited in the retrospective exhibition We the People in 2019, Gothamist 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. and by the Philadelphia Inquirer 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, 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 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."

In a 2019 interview with Artspace, Ward describes a visit to the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia that was part of the Underground Railroad, and how the floors included holes in the pattern of the Kongo cosmogram 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, "Police violence victim Eric Garner's haunting 2014 cry, "I can't breathe," is also evoked by the panels." 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.

Nari Ward: We The People, 2019 In 2019, a traveling installation opened at The New Museum, featuring "Amazing Grace" (1993),

Honors and awards Ward is the recipient of numerous awards including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Willard L. Metcalf Award (1998), Pollock Krasner Foundation grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1992). He has also participated in the Studio Museum in Harlem's Artist-in-Residence program

Publications

Nawi, Diana. (2015). Nari Ward: Sun Splash. exhibition catalog. New York: Prestel Publishing. Gioni, Massimiliano. (2019). Nari Ward: We the People. exhibition catalog. New York: Phaidon Press.