Nari ward we the people 2011

Nari Ward is one of the most important contemporary artists in America today. His work routinely features in the biggest museum shows. I had the opportunity to see Nari Ward “We the People” when it was installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.

There should be people here.

Nari ward we the people 2011 youtube

Instead, there are only traces.

Shoelaces. Baby strollers. Baseball bats.

Lives lost?

Perhaps.

The absence gives Nari Ward’s work a post-apocalyptic feel. His installations ache for humans.

What happened here?

What happened to these people?

When Ward created these works beginning in the early 1990s, the answer could have been the AIDS or crack epidemics.

A modern reading calls to mind COVID-19 and police brutality. The universal messages inherit in Ward’s work remain as current today as they were when he launched his career.

“Nari has been making work that reckons with (America’s racial inequality) for decades, the rest of the world is just catching up to him now,” Nora Burnett Abrams