Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Nari Ward’s inclusion in Collective Memory, the Platform section of the 2024 edition of The Armory Show, on view at the Javits Center from September 6—8, 2024. Curated by Eugenie Tsai, Collective Memory brings together large-scale installations and site-specific works. The presentation will feature Ward’s DIXIE DREAMLAND (2023), marking the first time this work will be shown in public. DIXIE DREAMLAND is a significant work from Ward’s ongoing series exploring tactile and everyday materials, where he renders words and phrases out of multi-colored shoelaces inserted into a wall. For the artist, working with vernacular or found materials lends his work the ability to tap into mystery, memory, and emotion. Ward’s participation in Collective Memory comes on the heels of his retrospective exhibition Ground Break at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and concurrent to ongoin’, a solo exhibition of new work on view at Lehmann Maupin Seoul through October 19, 2024.
Reflecting Ward’s long standing interest in the relationship between history, commemoration, and language, DIXIE DREAMLAND references the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. During the racially charged and violent Massacre, armed white arsonists and looters ravaged Greenwood, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Often described as “America’s Black Wall Street,” Greenwood was home to many thriving businesses, including the Dixie and Williams Dreamland Theatres, the first cinemas for Black people in Tulsa during the era of segregation. The two theaters were across the street from one another, and both were destroyed during the Massacre.
Without the context of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the words “dixie” and “dreamland” are ambiguous. Like the shoelaces, language becomes a material through which Ward creates and conjures meaning. In commemorating these two theaters by rendering their names in physical material, Ward directs our attention towards the cultural and financial abundance of Greenwood; at the same time, the work recalls—yet does not restage—the devastating racial violence inflicted on the community. In this way, Ward forges a poetic encounter between the past and present, lending physical form to both memory and history. The shoelaces themselves also suggest the many bodies that could have handled and worn them, expanding this expression of grief to both the personal and collective.
By giving shape and form to language, Ward stages a physical and phenomenological experience of text. As the distance between the viewer and the work increases or decreases, so too does the legibility of the text; in using legible language, Ward crafts a physical experience where the viewer becomes aware of their spatial relationship to the work, mirroring the influence that the past bears on the present. Illustrating the symbiotic relationship between language, history, and memory, Ward asks, “how do I make it clear that it's still happening now, that history isn't then, history is alive today, ongoing?”
DIXIE DREAMLAND invites viewers to contemplate the extant impact of history on society’s past, present, and future. By harnessing both language and found objects as fine art materials, Ward calls our attention towards the role of perspective in memorialization, illuminating the potency art objects contain as potential vessels for commemoration.