Nari Ward

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.

In his "White Lies Subject" series, Ward carefully molded handmade paper to mimic in size

and appearance the makeshift cardboard signs held by people asking for assistance in the

form of food or money. In contrast to these, Ward’s works carry cryptic lines such as “Invest

in Dubai Properties” or “Can I trust you?”—phrases commonly used as disarming

mechanisms to lure victims of email phishing scams. For this body of work Ward gathered

dozens of emails from his spam folder—an intangible approach to collecting “junk” material

—and focused solely on their subject lines in an attempt to find the intention behind them.

He then transferred each line into handmade paper, a pure and dignified material, to give

these phrases a place in the physical world.

Ward stated, “For me the sense of them being recreated to be an artifice is an act of

redemption, as they are now present and quantified.” By giving these phrases physical form,

the artist takes away any agency they might have once carried. “The work is reclaiming the

fiction to be in service of craft, not lies.”

14.5 x 17 inches (paper)

36.8 x 43.2 cm

39 × 25 1/4 × 3 1/4 inches (framed)

99.06 x 64.135 x 8.25 cm (framed)

Courtesy of the Artist and Lehmann Maupin