Nari Ward creates sculptures and installations composed from discarded material found and collected in his Harlem neighborhood, including repurposed objects such as bottles, keys, cash registers, and shoelaces, among other materials. Ward re-contextualizes these found objects to create metaphorical meanings and confront social and political issues surrounding race, gentrification, and community.
“A Proclamation” is a text-based work made from one of Ward's signature materials – hanging shoelaces -- that confronts the fraught history of racism in the United States. The piece references the Emancipation Proclamation, the executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 that freed enslaved people in the Confederate states.
Ward is drawn to shoelaces in part because they are accessible materials that viewers will likely themselves have handled, and he seeks to summon viewers' own memories and associations as he engages these familiar objects. "A Proclamation" (2022) reflects the artist’s interest in collective expressions and experiences of language, particularly protest and public decrees. Ward lends shape and form to language to create a physical and phenomenological experience of text, while the many shoelaces are also suggestive of the many bodies that could have handled and worn them. Ward has drawn connections between his text-based works and his work with found objects across his practice. He has stated, “I like the challenge of working with language. It’s a little bit like the found object, in the sense that it’s this thing everyone thinks they know.” As Ward endows words with materiality, he stages a potent, transformative encounter between language and the body.