We The People
Nari Ward: We The People
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
1485 Delgany Street, Denver, CO 80202
July 1-September 20, 2020
Curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari
Admission: Weekends: Free; Weekdays: $10; College Students (with ID), Seniors 65+, and Military: $7; Teens and Children: Free
Review by Tameca L. Coleman
Nari Ward: We the People at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) features selected sculptures, multi-media works, and large-scale installations from the span of Jamaican-American artist Nari Ward’s career. The exhibit was curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, the Kraus Family Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and has previously shown at the New Museum in New York and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.
We the People arrives in Denver as though planned to coincide with current Black Lives Matter events, immigration anxieties, and pandemic news. Each installation incorporates repurposed materials such as baby strollers, televisions, a tanning bed, keys, shoelaces, burned baseball bats, bottles, fire hoses, and other findings in arrangements that evoke their everyday life associations and remind onlookers of topics such as racism and poverty. While Ward is never fully explicit in what he precisely wants to convey, he makes audiences feel a bodily sense of unease while also honoring the restorative power of African and African-American cultures in many of his works.
Nari Ward, Glory, oil barrel, fluorescent and ultraviolet tubes, computer parts, DVD, parrot audio recording, Plexiglas, fan, camera casing elements, paint cans, cement, towels, and rubber roofing membrane, 2004. Courtesy the artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul; and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, and Havana. Image by DARIA.
When turning a corner into a Nari Ward installation, it is difficult not to feel what’s arranged in the room viscerally. Often, installations incorporate multi-media effects, such as an eerie voice repeating short phrases over Glory—a fully functional tanning bed that is encapsulated inside of oil drums and which could imprint stars and stripes over a person’s skin with its UV lights behind flag-emblazoned Plexiglas panels.
Nari Ward, Amazing Grace, baby strollers, fire house, and audio, 1993. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. Image by Tameca L. Coleman.
Similarly, Mahalia Jackson singing “Amazing Grace” on loop over an installation of the same name features a womb-shaped pathway made of fire hoses framed by numerous deteriorating baby strollers. The soundtrack conjures feelings of reverence and loss as viewers interact with the piece by walking through and observing the strollers. Ward collected these from his neighborhood after they had been used, discarded, and then used and discarded again.
Nari Ward, Iron Heavens, oven pans, ironed sterilized cotton, and burned wooden bats, 1995. Collection Jeffrey Deitch. Image by Tameca L. Coleman.
Often, Ward’s sculptures perform the act of prayer and call for healing. For example, Iron Heavens, an installation made from old oven pans and burned baseball bats, spans a tall wall in the shape of an altarpiece that rises up out of the ash of splintered bats that seem to burst open with spores of cotton.
Nari Ward, Anchoring Escapement; Fang, grandfather clock case, copper sheet with patina, copper nails, and African statues, 2018. Collection Olivia Walton. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul. Images by DARIA.
Anchoring Escapement; Fang features African artifacts inside of a grandfather clock as well as a cosmogram—a spiritual symbol originally from central Africa. This design in copper emanates out from the vacant and patinaed clock face, moving upwards, carrying a blessing over an image of a ship at sea that serves as a bridge between two worlds.
Nari Ward, Resonance from the series Breathing Circles, oak, copper sheet, copper nails, and darkening patina, 2018. Collection Erica Gervais and Ted Pappendick. Images by Tameca L. Coleman and DARIA.
Cosmograms also appear in Ward’s Breathing Circles series, which feature large circles of wood covered in copper sheets and punctured with bright copper nails and wires strung from them. Copper is a metal that is deemed to be healing, and under the nails and wire there are footprints on the patinaed surface depicting perhaps escape or energy rising. As the wall text informs visitors, these cosmogram forms recreate the pattern of the breathing holes bored into the floor of the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, which was a stop on the Underground Railroad. The history of slavery collides with the beauty and spiritual force of the design in these works.
Nari Ward: We the People opened at Denver’s MCA on July 1 and is on view through September 20, 2020.
Tameca L. Coleman is a singer, writer, art dabbler, and massage therapist, who recently completed an MFA in poetry and fiction as a member of the Mile-High MFA program’s first cohort at Regis University in Denver. They are a published multi-genre writer, sometimes editor, sometimes promoter of creatives who create positive change.
