Nari Ward, Scandal Bag; History Feeds Mistrust, 2015 . Chromogenic color print, 20 x 20 inches (50.8 × 50.8 cm). Courtesy the artist; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, and Havana; and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photographed by Steven Rose. Image courtesy the artist; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, and Havana; and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. © Nari Ward
Nari Ward, We the People, 2011. Shoelaces, 96 x 324 inches (243.8 × 594.4 cm). In collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, Gift of the Speed Contemporary, 2016.1. Photo by Will Brown, image courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia © Nari Ward
Nari Ward, Mango Tourist, 2011. Foam, battery canisters, Sprague Electric Company resistors and capacitors, and mango seeds 3 figures, each 120 x 72 x 72 inches (304.8 × 182.9 × 182.9 cm). In collaboration with MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo by John Kennard. © Nari Ward
Nari Ward, Sky Juice, 1993. Umbrella, iron fence, cement, textiles, plastic soda bottles, photographs, Tropical Fantasy soda, and sugar 106 × 72 × 95 inches (269.2 × 182.9 × 241.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Peter Norton. Photo by John Kennard. © Nari Ward
Nari Ward, Naturalization Drawing Table, 2004. Plexiglas, crenellation table, and INS naturalization application, two parts: table 45 x 51 x 99 inches; chair 34 x 22 x 21 inches. Courtesy the artist; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, and Havana; and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Installation view, Nari Ward: Sun Splashed, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 2017 Photo by John Kennard. © Nari Ward
Nari Ward, Happy Smilers: Duty Free Shopping, 1996. Awning, plastic soda bottles, fire hose, fire escape, salt, household elements, audio recording, speakers, and aloe vera plant, dimensions variable PAMM installation 41 × 20 feet (492 1/8 × 240 1/16 in.). Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo by John Kennard. © Nari Ward
Nari Ward, Radha Liquorsoul, 2010. Metal and neon sign, PVC tube with artificial flowers, shoelaces, and shoe tips, 126 x 25 x 29 inches (320 × 63.5 × 73.7 cm). Collection of Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehmann. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo by John Kennard. © Nari Ward
Spectacular, ambitiously scaled artworks created from unlikely materials
#NariWard
Nari Ward: Sun Splashed is the largest survey of the artist’s work to date. Emerging alongside a notable group of black artists in New York City in the 1990s, Nari Ward (b. 1963 in St. Andrew Parish, Jamaica) actively engages with local sites—their histories, communities, and economies—to create spectacular, ambitiously scaled artworks out of unlikely materials. He derives inspiration from his immediate environment, incorporating found objects gathered in and around urban neighborhoods and embracing varied cultural references. Working in sculpture, collage, photography, video, installation, and performance, Ward captures the makeshift qualities of everyday life and imbues his production with a visceral relationship to history and the real world. The exhibition includes artworks made from soda pop, shoelaces, shopping carts, and a fire escape, materials that speak to the artist’s distinctive experimentation. Nari Ward: Sun Splashed focuses on vital points of reference for Ward, including his native Jamaica, citizenship, and migration, as well as African-American history and culture, to explore the dynamics of power and politics in society.
Superhuman vision, once the stuff of comic books and cartoons, is no longer a fantasy.
New technologies have pushed the limits of the visible world, allowing us to see almost anything—from the elemental particles of matter to the far reaches of outer space. Both what can be seen and how we are able to see are being radically transformed in ways that have profound implications for advanced science, global politics, and everyday life. Super Vision examines this phenomenon in the context of contemporary art, presenting work by 27 international artists who are defining the distinctive character of the contemporary visual experience.
Among the breathtaking and provocative works in the exhibitions are pieces that seem to bend, twist, morph, or enter a new dimension, as artists such as Anish Kapoor, Bridget Riley, and James Turrell use optical effects to alter the way we perceive ourselves and the space around us. Works by Mona Hatoum, Harun Farocki, and Chantal Akerman explore disembodied sight-while some technologies replace the human body, Hatoum’s Corps étranger travels inside it with a video portrait of her body’s interior.
Super Vision also considers how technology transforms artists’ understanding of the physical world-from Ed Ruscha’s conceptual map to Sigmar Polke’s depiction of a carbon atom. Today’s vision breaks wide open the possibilities for human knowledge and experience, but as the insidious web cam in Albert Oehlen’s painting Dose and the chaotic energy of works by Julie Mehretu and Jeff Koons show us, the effects can also be threatening. Like the realization of any fantasy, this powerful new vision is both thrilling and dangerous.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia is among the most influential and innovative photographers of the past thirty years.
Bringing together 125 photographs made from the late-1970s to the present, including selections from all of his distinct series, this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of diCorcia’s work in the United States.
DiCorcia’s images perch on the lines between fact and fiction, blending a documentary mode with techniques of staged photography. The viewer is often unsure whether a scene has been found or posed by diCorcia, which lends an uncanny quality to the typically mundane imagery the artist presents. Ultimately, his work asks viewers to question the assumed truth of a photograph and to consider alternative ways that images might speak to and represent reality.
In the mid-1970s, diCorcia (born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut) attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, followed by a Masters of Fine Art in Photography at Yale University. From the very beginning, he pursued a middle ground between two major photographic modes of the period. A modernist documentary style influenced by Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus is evident, but so too is an approach informed by conceptual art, which mobilizes images as cultural archetypes or signs.
In all his work, diCorcia captures moments that seem arrested in the chaotic flux of the larger world. From the psychological tension of his staged tableaux to his portraits of pedestrians on city streets to his experimental narrative sequence A Storybook Life, the ultimate effect of diCorcia’s photographs is a sense of reality hanging in a threshold, uncertain, instable, and poetic.
For over 20 years, New York-based artist Charles LeDray has created handmade sculptures in stitched fabric, carved bone, and wheel-thrown clay. LeDray painstakingly fashions smaller-than-life formal suits, embroidered patches, ties, and hats, as well as scaled-down chests of drawers, doors, thousands of unique, thimble-sized vessels, and even complex models of the solar system.
The exhibition gathers approximately 50 sculptures and installations, from seminal early works to the first U.S. presentation of MENS SUITS (2006-2009), his highly acclaimed project presenting three complex, small-scale vignettes of second-hand clothing shops. The ICA will also premiere Throwing Shadows (2008-2010), an extraordinary new ceramic work including more than 3,000 vessels made of black porcelain, each less than two inches tall.
Seemingly obsolete in today’s era of MP3s and iTunes, vinyl is experiencing a significant resurgence, and not just among collectors and audio purists—records and record players are increasingly popular as vehicles of expression for artists. The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl explores the intersection between visual art and music, the first museum exhibition to consider the vinyl record as both an inspiration and a material for artist production.
Examining work from 1965 to 2010, The Record brings together artists from around the world working in sound work, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, video, and performance.
Accompanying the exhibition is Cover to Cover—an installation featuring 7 listening stations designed by 9 artists and musicians who each curated a crate of 20 albums. Each artist’s theme and “story’ can be discovered by thumbing through bins containing original albums, examining the covers and playing the records. Visitors will peruse the crates and with headphones listen to records on record players.
The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl was organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and is curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art.