Tricia Ward

Tricia Ward is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work has included public and environmental art, sculpture, and social practice art. She emerged in the 1980s, when collaborations with underserved youth and urban groups that bridged art and social change began to gain institutional attention. Her work combines collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches that include physical transformations of derelict urban environments into "pocket parks," environmental remediation, cultural and educational programming, public policy and civic engagement.

Tricia Ward/ACLA, La Tierra de la Culebra, 1992–present, Highland Park Neighborhood, Los Angeles. Ward has created public projects in New York, Houston, Detroit and Buenos Aires. However, the majority of her work has been undertaken in Los Angeles, through the nonprofit organization that she founded and led, ACLA (Art Community Land Activism), originally known as ARTScorpsLA. The organization's most well-known projects include the art parks La Tierra de la Culebra and Spiraling Orchard, and the public, multi-mural project, "Walls of Reclamation." Ward's work has been recognized by institutions including the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, California Community Foundation, and Getty Trust, among others. She and Maroney split time between Galveston and New York City in the 1980s. During that time, Ward produced mixed-media sculpture and assemblage, while also developing a hybrid concept blending art and parks, an offshoot of her work then with New York's Green Guerillas.

Tricia Ward/ACLA, Spiraling Orchard, 1996–2014, Temple-Beaudry Neighborhood, Los Angeles. Work Ward's unique practice merges interests in the physicality of three-dimensional artworks and environments, neighborhood and community revitalization, and urban land use. Writers have noted her methodology's focus on gaining community acceptance—often taking up residency among them—its flexible mode of light, nonprofit management (as opposed to the rigidity of city agencies), and fairly "radical notion of public space as continually contested territory belonging to no single owner permanently."

Early studio art Ward's early art included clay and bronze sculpture, reliquaries and mixed-media assemblage.

The organization emerged from Ward's efforts to clear a derelict parcel of land in her Highland Park neighborhood. She mobilized a group of youth volunteers and with them dug up the site, unearthing stone foundation remnants from several houses that they reused to, among other things, build an amphitheater. Through a series of discussions, the group also developed a motif for the site—the serpent (la Culebra), a Mayan and Asian symbol of wisdom and renewal—which would serve as the site's name, La Tierra de la Culebra, and inspire its most striking feature, a 450-foot, winding sculpture made of brick and stone.

Tricia Ward, A Member of the Community of Spirits Within and Among a Community of Trees, composite materials, 2019–20. Los Angeles County Arboretum. Some of ACLA's other projects included Studio Chinatown, a community center and performance space offering classes, art studio space and cultural programming; and "Beat the Drum Fest," a multi-ethnic drumming festival organized by Ward in 2002 and presented at the Craft and Folk Art Museum and Ford Amphitheater in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Her site-responsive piece, Shared Foundations (Project Row Houses, Houston, 1999), engaged community members to create a series of linoleum painted tiles, which she assembled into a narrative floor in a row house she was given for the project. In 2001, she and Deborah Grotfeldt initiated Riches of Detroit: Faces of Detroit as part of the Detroit Institute of Art show "Artists' Take on Detroit: Projects for the Tricentennial." They worked with diverse Detroiters and organizations to transform unused buildings and vacant lots on a city block, including two rehabilitated houses that would serve as student residences, a community center and an art park. The project was documented in a multimedia presentation and installation at the institute that included hay bales and concrete structures replicating park's conversation area.

Ward's essays and ideas about public art, work with youth, and urban land use have been presented in the book, Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art (1998), the journal, Local Environment, and in numerous lectures at graduate programs throughout the United States. and National Endowment for the Arts,