Nari Ward | Apollo/Poll | 2017

New York-based artist Nari Ward is a bricoleur. He recuperates left-over objects and images from his walks around New York, particularly his Harlem neighborhood, and breathes new life into them in sometimes elegiac, something shocking juxtapositions. These objects range from furniture and tools to a child’s crib. Ward honors how these objects become part of our lives, and end as talismans of a time and place that no longer needs them. These objects speak of loving care by their owners and the unseen forces that end in displacement and abandonment. He is interested in “cultural identity, social progress, material histories and a sense of belonging.”

Ward explores themes and imagery from African American culture, sports, politics and place. He investigates the power and hidden histories of objects, embracing this past while allowing them to resonate with today’s politics. The artist uses African and African-American traditions—weaving, wrapping, recycling—that embrace old and new, that show us how the flavor the past colors how we live in the present. There is often an air of melancholy, of meaning slipping away in his sculptures, but Ward’s goal is to bring them back to us with lessons of the past.

Ward’s most recent show played with visual tropes of outdoor structures: signage, lawn ornaments, playgrounds and monuments. Apollo/Poll in an homage to the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, epicenter of Black Renaissance fueled by the Great Migration from the South to the North between 1910 and 1970. The sign, commissioned by the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, reflects Ward’s rumination on enterprise and the “…art of self-promotion, performance, originality, and the meaning of communal acceptance.” The Apollo was founded in 1914 as Hurtig and Seamon’s New Burlesque Theater that did not allow African Americans as patrons or performers. In 1934 the name changed, and the owners marketed specifically to African Americans. While viewers may know Amateur Night at the Apollo, where the audience gets to vote on their favorite act—hence the word POLL. 

Apollo, the Greek god of light, healing, music and truth, is an appropriate name for this cultural site. This sense of democracy was likely understood as ironic, for African Americans continued to withstand ever-tightening Jim Crow laws to restrict where they lived, how they worked, and how they created community. Apollo/Poll holds particular resonance in our historical moment, when belonging, access and community are under attack. Ward creates works that are slippery, since as an immigrant from Jamaica, his history is not American history. He grew up speaking Patois, where various languages—English, French, Spanish and African languages—are intermingled, not spoken sequentially, or hierarchically. Ward slips between visual languages, bringing us critique and pathos in his installations.