The Collection

For over three decades, Nari Ward has created large-scale sculptural installations and multimedia works that transform the material and symbolic residue of everyday life into powerful meditations on race, identity, community, and democracy. Since the early 1990s, Ward has collected discarded objects—shopping carts, shoelaces, baby strollers, bottles, fire hoses, cash registers, and other urban detritus—primarily from Harlem, his longtime neighborhood. By re-contextualizing these materials, he creates juxtapositions that confront histories of systemic injustice while opening space for reflection, resilience, and renewal.

Ward’s breakout installation Amazing Grace (1993), constructed from over 300 abandoned baby strollers arranged alongside fire hoses and accompanied by Mahalia Jackson’s recording of the hymn, addressed the AIDS crisis and drug epidemic that devastated Black communities in New York. The work, now recognized as a landmark of contemporary art, set the tone for a practice that fuses formal experimentation with collective memory and social commentary. Subsequent works such as We the People (2011), spelled out in shoelaces, and Peace Walk (2022–24), copper panels patterned after city sidewalks and imprinted with traces of street memorial offerings, continue to probe questions of shared belonging, protest, and remembrance.

Ward’s art often draws on African diasporic traditions, spirituality, and vernacular culture, engaging the paradox of objects that embody both trauma and vitality. His installations occupy the border between monument and memorial, harnessing the ambiguity of found materials to invite viewers into layered readings of history, loss, and possibility.

Ward has exhibited widely, including major retrospectives at the New Museum (2019) and Pérez Art Museum Miami (2015), and his work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Walker Art Center, among others. A recipient of the Rome Prize (2012) and the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts (2017), Ward is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Hunter College, CUNY.