Nari Ward has shown in solo and group exhibitions around the globe. In 2011, he had a solo exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art entitled Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum. His installation filled all of the museum's second floor and investigated transformative spaces that straddle the division between leisure and work. In the previous year he exhibited in a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery and was part of Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Rotunda curated by Nancy Spector and held at the Guggenheim Museum. Other notable exhibitions include Prospect.1, New Orleans ; Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York ; Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany ; a solo exhibition entitled Nari Ward's Rites-of-Way in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; a solo exhibition entitled Episodes at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston ; and a solo exhibition entitled The Refinery X: A small twist of fate at the Palazzo delle Papesse-Centro Arte Contemporanea in Siena, Italy. Nari Ward is the recipient of numerous awards including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Willard L. Metcalf Award, Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also participated in the Studio Museum in Harlem's Artist-in-Residence program
Installations
Amazing Grace, 1993
Nari Ward's First exhibition and creative installation, Amazing Grace, at the New Museum is part of a larger multi-level exhibition at the Museum entitled NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star. The exhibition is composed mostly of found objects, trash, discarded objects, and other mixed media amalgamations. Ward fits into this exhibition, and the discourse surrounding it perfectly as a New York Based, mixed media artist who typically uses locally found objects to approach issues such as consumer culture, poverty, and race. For this installation Ward collected a myriad of disposed, or otherwise abject children's strollers in Harlem as well as other neighborhoods in Manhattan. There might have been 100–150 strollers involved in the installation, all of which had seem to have aged and dated to match the theme of the exhibition. Ward sets up an oval path through these strollers in a kind of nostalgic lap through these long-forgotten remnants of every American raised individual's childhood. Ward uses fire hoses connected by knots as the path and has a rendition of "Amazing Grace" sung by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson playing on repeat. The bluesy version of this national anthem sets the mood for what can only be described as a nostalgically thought-provoking stroll through strollers.
Hunger Cradle, 1996
In 1996 Nari Ward participated in the entirely artist-run exhibition 3 Legged Race, organised by two friends of Ward, the artists Janine Antoni and Marcel Odenbach. For the show, which took place in an abandoned firehouse in Harlem, one of the works he produced was Hunger Cradle: a web-like structure made from rope and colourful yarn throughout which he wove a myriad of items, including a cradle. The structure gave them a magical quality suspending them in mid-air.
Mango Tourist, 2011
Using found objects and materials collected from his urban neighborhood, Nari Ward creates sculptural installations that subvert the original purpose of the items shown. From previous works such as Palace LiquorsouL, Ward rearranges the letters of the title in a neon liquor store sign, illuminating only "S-O-U-L", leaving the remaining letters unlit and upside down. Though there were unexpected compositional arrangements, Ward enacts a transformation of everyday objects into visual markers rich with symbolic and narrative implications.
Breathing Directions
Nari ward in November 2015 created his most impacting exhibit, Breathing Directions. Breathing Directions was created from a trip Nari had taken recently to a church known as "The First African Baptist Church" located in Savannah, Georgia. The church itself was part of the many stops during the Underground Railroads peak in history. The floorboards of the church show a symbol known as the " BaKongo Cosmogram" this symbol would be made out of large holes to help slaves underneath the church breath safely without being found. Although, no one has found the exact tunnels to the underneath of the floorboards it is a powerful story of African slaves escaping death itself. In Nari's paintings he uses this symbol to communicate what he had felt while being in the church surrounded by ancient artifacts of the 1850s and 60s.
