Creative Africa, Nari Ward, Philadelphia Art, African Art, KOLUMN Magazine

Philadelphia Offers a Full-Fledged Summer of African Art

Art, Beauty ... Posted by: KOLUMN Magazine Staff

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Philadelphia Offers a Full-Fledged Summer of African Art

[three_fourth padding=”0 15px 0 0px”]Philadelphia Offers a Full-Fledged Summer of African Art

by HOLLAND COTTER | THE NEW YORK TIMES

People talk about Africa as if it were a unitary thing, one culture, one mind, which it’s not.

[dropcap]That’s[/dropcap] my only problem with “Creative Africa,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and my complaint stops with the title. The project itself, a set of five small, tight, concurrent exhibitions of African material, is richly textured, and in one case sensational.

Add to it a fine survey of work by the Afro-Caribbean conceptualist Nari Ward at the nearby Barnes Foundation, and the foundation’s pioneering and under-known collection of “classical” African sculpture, and this city can lay claim to being in the middle of a full-fledged African art summer. The Philadelphia Museum has installed its five shows in the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, a former 1920s insurance headquarters down the hill from its main location. And the largest of them, the only one of traditional objects, called “Look Again: Contemporary Perspectives on African Art,” is drawn almost entirely from the holdings of yet another august local institution, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, better known as the Penn Museum. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″]
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Nari Ward, Land, 2002-present Metal, wood, parachute materials, barrier cloth, used wheels, and audio elements. Installation view: Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas. Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Hong Kong.
Nari Ward, Land, 2002-present Metal, wood, parachute materials, barrier cloth, used wheels, and audio elements. Installation view: Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas. Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Hong Kong.
Nari Ward Iron Heavens, 1995. Oven pans, ironed cotton, and burnt wooden bats. 140 x 148 x 48 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Hong Kong.
Nari Ward Iron Heavens, 1995. Oven pans, ironed cotton, and burnt wooden bats. 140 x 148 x 48 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Hong Kong.
Nari Ward, Airplane Tears, 2005. Found television backs and napkins Dimensions variable. Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Hong Kong.
Nari Ward, Airplane Tears, 2005. Found television backs and napkins Dimensions variable. Image courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, and Hong Kong.
Creative Africa, Nari Ward, Philadelphia Art, African Art, KOLUMN Magazine
“Mango Tourists,” a work from 2011 by Nari Ward. Credit Sabina Louise Pierce for The New York Times
Creative Africa, Nari Ward, Philadelphia Art, African Art, KOLUMN Magazine
A detail from a photograph by Seydou Camara. Credit Sabina Louise Pierce for The New York Times
Creative Africa, Nari Ward, Philadelphia Art, African Art, KOLUMN Magazine
A scene from the show “Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage.” Credit Sabina Louise Pierce for The New York Times
Creative Africa, Nari Ward, Philadelphia Art, African Art, KOLUMN Magazine
A wall of African masks at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Credit Sabina Louise Pierce for The New York Times
NARI WARD
CREATIVE – Sculture
Nari Ward was born in 1963 in St. Andrews, Jamaica and he currently lives and works in New York. Ward’s dramatic sculptural installations are composed of systematically collected material from his urban neighborhood. By revealing the numerous emotions inherent within found everyday objects, Ward’s works examine issues surrounding race, poverty, and consumer culture.

Ward was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial in New York and Documenta XI in Kassel (2003), and his works have been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. Recent solo exhibitions include Episodes at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, The Refinery X: A small twist of fate at the Palazzo delle Papesse-Centro Arte Contemporanea in Siena, Italy, and Rites of Way at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Ward received commissions from the United Nations and the World Health Organization, and Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation.
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“Contemporary Perspectives” does not mean a tangle of interpretive theory laid on the past. The curator, Kristina Van Dyke, a former director of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, proposes that anyone can relate to African art by looking hard and asking basic questions. She asks some herself in exhibition wall texts.

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