In a career spanning over three decades, artist Nari Ward (b. 1963, St. Andrew, Jamaica; lives and works in New York) has gained recognition for an interdisciplinary and multimedia practice that engages historical and contemporary discourse around race, migration, democracy, identity, and community. Ward is best known for his wall- and installation-based sculptural works created primarily from materials found and collected throughout Harlem, his longtime neighborhood in New York. These objects imbue his work with a sense of intimacy, reflecting the shared experience of community. Combining materials to re-contextualize their original meanings, Ward’s assemblages probe a range of spiritual and conceptual issues through literal and metaphorical juxtaposition.
Materially specific but conceptually ambiguous, Ward’s multimedia and performance works unfold into many possible interpretations—as materials and movements accumulate, so too do signifiers. Each found object—including baseball bats, strollers, shoelaces, cash registers, bottles, and shopping carts—contains a multiplicity of meanings and histories that speak to both collective experience and individual memory. The intentional synthesis of such objects, combined with the more traditional disciplines of painting, sculpture, and performance, allows for varied interpretations, inviting viewers to project their own associations and transcend the specific context of any given work. At the same time, Ward’s art reflects on the complexities of contemporary society, transforming overlooked material through artmaking to foreground forgotten histories or marginalized communities.
In Ward’s haunting and provocative installation work Amazing Grace (1993), the artist responds to the AIDS crisis and drug epidemic that disproportionately affected Black communities in the early 1990s. The installation places over 300 discarded baby strollers alongside fire hoses, inviting viewers to confront the duality of human existence. A monument to loss, displacement, and the search for redemption, Amazing Grace remains urgently relevant today. Similarly, Still Lives with Step Ladders (2020) pays tribute to communal mourning, emulating a makeshift street memorial. The installation is composed of urban detritus including bottles, milk crates, candles, suitcases, and step ladders filled with cement, all covered in somber black cloth. Candles arranged in the formation of the Kongo Cosmogram reference the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth, offering space for contemplation and reverence. Ward continues to engage commemoration and communal space in his recent work. His large-scale copper Peace Walk (2022–2024) panels are patterned after sidewalk squares; Ward applies a darkening patina to leave traces of floral bouquets, candles, liquor bottles, and other objects from street memorials. The series title comes from protest terminology, referring to people coming together to march against an injustice—which recalls Ward’s earlier We the People (2011), a text-based installation composed of shoelaces that explores how an art object might serve in an activist capacity to make calls for change. Though created over a span of more than 30 years, these works each function as sites of collective remembrance, community resilience, and shared historical memory—central thematic concerns that undergird Ward’s decades-long career.
Artist portrait by Axel Dupeux