Nari Ward: G.O.A.T., again by Socrates Sculpture Park

Nari Ward: G.O.A.T., again

Socrates Sculpture Park

Fig. 1-8 G.O.A.T.s Details

Foreword

by John Hatfield, Executive Director III

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APOLLO/POLL G.O.A.T.s Scapegoat Bipartition Bell Shun-Light King: finish line, jump rope IV

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Greatest of All Time, again

I’ve Known This Time as Other Times. I’ve Known This Place as Other Places

by Jess Wilcox, Director of Exhibitions V

by LeRonn Brooks, Art Historian

Blason For Nari

by Paolo Javier, Poet VII

VIII

Interview with NARI WARD IX

Fig. 44-48 Preparatory Drawings

Fig. 49-65 Production Images

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About NARI WARD

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Colophon

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Foreword

by John Hatfield, Executive Director Nari Ward is neither a G.O.A.T., nor the Greatest Of All Time as the title of this exhibition suggests, but he is a Shepherd. With guile, wisdom, passion, and facility of sculptural form, he leads us into delightful green pastures or possibly to sacrificial slaughter. And we go willingly! Within the fenced parameters of Socrates Sculpture Park, Ward gently prods us with a staff or soft-spoken command to experience the sculptural landscape he has created, evocatively setting into motion our own thoughts and ideas about what is on view. Ward has truly created “public” art at Socrates Sculpture Park by creating sculptures that place into question how we collectively bestow value or determine importance. In this sense, Ward is leveraging the highly public and diverse context of the park, and our diverse community, to probe ideas of worth, popularity, and social values. Public validation determining one’s self worth, or social status, is suggested by Apollo/Poll, Bipartition Bell, Shun-Light, and Scapegoat. Each of these works delve into either our individual psyche or explore society’s values through the heroic scale of outdoor sculpture. Alive with joy, humor and imbued with a survivalist’s determination, the 20 cast concrete G.O.A.T.s installed throughout the park toggle between triumph and humiliation, hubris and insecurity. They are beasts of burden skewered with rebar to carry urban detritus found on the shore or in the streets. Seemingly they have clamored to a precipice, congregated or wandered off on their own and the horned beasts stand steady as sentinels in the park watching us - as we watch them. Friendly and slightly threatening, the goats are admired for bravery and also subjected to ignominy with eggs crushed on their heads. Humiliation and/or adoration are ultimately public forms of judgment. The genius of Ward’s work is not the polemic posed by these particular opposites, but rather the permutations of interpretations, narratives, and nuanced mysteries elicited by the artworks’ presence and their relationship to one another. It is impossible to have one set conclusion about the meaning of the work or reconcile the contradictory feelings that are brought

out by their existence. Any interpretation of Ward’s work at Socrates is malleable to our own perspectives and cultural orientations, and for me personally I believe that many of the works in this exhibition seem to be about the very nature, spirit, and consequence of courage. I remember as a young child in Louisville the reverence bestowed upon Muhammad Ali as a hero, and only later as an adult finding out that he was vilified for proclaiming himself the Greatest Of All Time as a young black man, denigrated for changing his name and converting to Islam, stripped of his world boxing titles and 16 arrested for his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. Perhaps it’s our specific time in divisive politics, racial discord, economic inequity, and culture clashes that I view Nari Ward: G.O.A.T., again as an exposition on courage, whether as acts of bravery or simply existential endurance. Courage indeed takes multiple forms, and I would like to thank all those who have made the exhibition possible. First and foremost the artist and Shepherd of it all, Nari Ward, who brilliantly responded to the opportunity of the entire park so ambitiously, with grace, skill, hard work, and intelligence. To the staff that embarked on the pleasurable stress of fulfilling these ambitions; especially Jess Wilcox, Director of Exhibitions (for shepherding the Shepherd!) and Chris Zirbes, Studio & Facilities Manager, and crew for whom no challenge was too great and no detail overlooked. This publication is also a product of a collaboration with Jess Wilcox leading the way with an astute reading of the works in the show, a personal reflection on Ward’s work by LeRonn Brooks, and a poetic tribute by Paolo Javier set within a beautiful design by Fay Kolokytha and with photography by Nicholas Knight, Sara Morgan, and Lee Jaffe. Money – there is courage there too. We are grateful to those who supported the endeavor to commission all new work and to stretch the very capacity and abilities of an organization and artist to pull it off. The exhibition would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of the Lambent Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, and the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, with additional support from Lehmann Maupin and Galleria Continua, as well as Roberta and Steven Denning; and, of course, our partners in making it happen, Mark di Suvero’s team at Spacetime, C.C. At the eleventh hour, we were also able to make the publication we all desired with an important grant from Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Nari Ward: G.O.A.T., again and the artworks in the park last only a summer and we are fortunate to be able to spend time together, objects and people contemplating one another.

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Nari Ward: G.O.A.T., again Fig. 9-43

The park’s first single-artist exhibition in its 30 year history, this exhibition features a series of newly commissioned artworks that examine how hubris creates misplaced expectations in American culture. Ward recasts tropes of outdoor structures–the monument, the playground, lawn ornaments, architectural barriers, and the advertising sign–into surreal and playful creations. This expands the artist’s ongoing exploration of cultural identity, social progress, material histories, and our sense of belonging. Situated in the unique site that is Socrates Sculpure Park, the exhibition highlights the urban environment as a meeting place, a site of cultural exchange and transformation, and a platform for individual and communal expression.

This sign’s red letters and yellow ground are inspired by those of the neon beacon that hangs over Harlem’s Apollo Theater, a renowned venue for African American entertainers. The piece changes throughout the day. Visible at dusk, the LED letters ‘A’ and ‘O’ blink on and off to spell out alternatively “APOLLO” and “POLL.” The word “POLL” suggests both the theater’s wellknown Amateur Night in which the audience decides the winner, and the democratic election process. As the sun sets, Apollo/Poll emanates a red glow that ties together the art of self-promotion, originality, and the meaning of consensus.

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APOLLO/POLL Fig. 9-13 Steel, wood, vinyl, LED lights 12 x 4 x 30 feet

Set against the backdrop of Manhattan’s towers and a clear view of the sky, Apollo/Poll fuses Ward’s interest in ideas of social and spiritual ascension. Building on ancient associations of height with the heavens and light with the divine, the sign may imply that art has been elevated to religion’s replacement in contemporary society. Alone and out of place on the waterfront, the sign becomes a potent symbol for New York City’s culture of striving and aspiration.

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Manifesting the show’s title and installed throughout the park is a series of 20 cast concrete goat sculptures derived from a lawn ornament. The sculptures are a visual pun on the acronym for Greatest of All Time, which is frequently used for athletes and musicians, from Muhammad Ali to Queens native L.L. Cool J. Rebar poles grow out of or, depending on your perspective, are impaled into the backs of the goats. Ward uses different materials, ranging from telephone wires and copper to fire hoses and tarred feathers, to weave through and affix to the rebar. These materials index other works in the exhibition, as well as Ward’s past works.

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G.O.A.T.s Fig. 14-27 Concrete, sand, fiberglass, pigment, rebar, and mixed media 32 x 10 x 72 inches each

Ward enhances the G.O.A.T.s’ symbolic associations with their placement throughout the park and the material accumulations on their backs. Intelligent, curious, agile, and adventurous climbers of great heights, goats are known to be social, but independent, and are not easily herded. With a voracious appetite, they consume just about anything. Although long domesticated animals, in the wild goats quickly revert to a feral state and are notorious for aggressive behavior. The proximities and distances among this motley crew reproduce the social frictions of living with others–a closely knit pack, an odd couple, an isolated outcast. Ward’s G.O.A.T.s seem to represent a dynamic and unruly collective, reflective of the human condition.

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With a colossal faux-stone head that recalls the enormous busts of political leaders, this forty-foot long hobby goat toy can be understood as a satirical monument. Here Ward infantilizes the impulse towards the mammoth by adding handlebars to the goat’s head, its neck tilted at an angle like a playground balance beam. The absurd size is reminiscent of amusement park games, funhouse features and roadside attractions, saturated with the air of childhood and adolescent anxieties. Tightly bound with firehose, the goat’s central shaft, part neck, part body, sprouts directly from a wheel. Its width dilates to connect with the engorged head. Pathetically face planted into the ground, Scapegoat’s stoney expression and pursed

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Scapegoat Fig. 28-31 Steel, wood, concrete, tire tread, fire hose 40 x 12 x 12 feet

lips may read as an old toy aware of having been thrown aside. The massive wheel of rusted steel appears burdensome and immobile, which undermines its presumed function of movement. The piece’s title is open to multiple readings: a political fall-guy, one blamed for others’ misfortune, and the original meaning from the Old Testament. In the book of Leviticus, the scapegoat is the bearer of the community’s sins, ritually cast out into the wilderness as a means of atonement. Set among the park’s lush greenery and vertical orientation, Scapegoat’s first syllable suggests a play on the idea of landscape. Alternatively, paired with the connotations of the fire hose– the urgency of a fire or its use as a weapon during the civil rights movement–it reads as an abridged cry: ‘escape!’

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Bipartition Bell Fig. 32-37 Steel, wood, copper, goat bell 11 x 3 x 14 feet

Bipartition Bell plays with ideals of monumentality, virility, and authenticity. The outer bell’s green patinated exterior protrudes on opposites sides, appearing bifurcated, in the shape of a billy goat’s testicles. Hanging from a resilient steel I-beam frame, the bell’s cup structure is large enough for visitors to duck under and introduce their head and torso into its interior. While the piece’s exterior is unmoving and thus non-functional, it houses a set of thimble-sized goat bells that emit a dainty ring. Belying the grandeur and patina of the copper, the petite inner bell undermines the appearance of greatness.

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The genesis for this piece is the visual and spatial partitions often employed around construction sites. Enclosed within the structure and barely visible through an obscuring black and white scrim hangs a bulbous tangle of glossy black skeins punctuated with lights–a hidden chandelier. Transforming discarded consumer goods into a source of light and symbol of luxury, Shun-Light simultaneously beckons and denies access. Pairing the gauzy scrim with a ring of louvered slats, Ward doubles the concealments and thwarts a clear view of the work’s interior. The x-ray image of a cowrie shell reading, a form of fortune telling, which adorns the scrim (re-purposed from Ward’s 2014 Isabella Stewart Gardner piece Divination X ), adds

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Shun-Light Fig. 38-41 Steel, wood, glass bottles, tar, aluminum paint, plastic wrap, foam, and lights 11 x 11 x 14 feet

another layer of mystery and history. As dusk arrives, Shun-Light’s inaccessible core emanates a seductive warm glow, heightening the desire to enter. These opposing forces of attraction and negation call forth social and psychic barriers that emerge within the urban field, and other forms of inclusion and exclusion.

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King: finish line, jump rope Fig. 42, 43 Vinyl 10 x 28 feet

Hovering in an undefined space, this incongruous object complicates its potential uses. Playground games or agility training would be difficult with this jump rope. What the imprint ‘King’ on its brick handles refers to is ambiguous. Elvis Presley? Michael Jackson? Martin Luther King Jr.? Another male monarch yet to rise to ruler status? The image’s fusion of weight and movement evoke the great Muhammad Ali who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. A master of words, Ali famously bragged that he was so tough that he “murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick” and after defeating Sonny Liston in the 1964 World Heavyweight Championship declared, “I am the greatest! I am king of the world!”

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Greatest of All Time, again by Jess Wilcox, Director of Exhibitionss

In this exhibition’s title Nari Ward modifies a superlative. In one phrase, the artist concurrently makes a historical claim, the greatest of all time, and also qualifies, reforms, and reconstitutes. The phrase suggests that history repeats itself and Ward’s projects within the park reprise familiar forms—lawn ornament, playground, monument, advertisement, and silo—but with a sly and tentative tone. Spoken out loud G.O.A.T., again sounds like ‘goad again,’ which could easily be considered a description of Ward’s strategy for the show. G.O.A.T., again prods viewers to revisit old inquiries about the consolidation of power

and marginalization of individuals through sculpture. Ward does this obliquely with linguistic ambiguities and associative dissonances. While each work contains elements of allegory, they do not read as simple parables. Instead the heteroglot works in G.O.A.T., again accrete meaning through association with one another. They simultaneously speak in multiple languages, communicating through a variety of approaches—material, symbolic, spatial, and linguistic— and in dialogue with various histories—of cities, of commodities, of the African diasporic experience, and of social mobility. These voices and histories reverberate throughout the grounds of the five acre park as a series of conversations among works within the show, as well as with Ward’s past works from other locations. The sounds and silences of these pieces act as guides. The polyphonic call of Apollo/Poll, the first work Ward conceived for the show, entices viewers with its warm, and steady glow. Cantilevered off a trussed steel tower, thirty feet high, the red lettered sign evokes the iconic theater in Harlem, the neighborhood where Ward lives and works. While the LED-lit “A” and “O” of “APOLLO” blink on and off, “POLL” always remains illuminated. The sound of its title spoken aloud generates a syncopated beat, a jingle for its origins in advertising. This connection to publicity and more broadly to entertainment are redoubled by the patches of an old Sprint vinyl banner that adorn its yellow face. Yet the sign blinks at a steady pace, like a metronome measuring out time, rather than urgently hawking goods. Its rhythms are discordant, out of step with the rest of the city. Beyond evoking the musicality of its namesake, Apollo/Poll brings forth the politics of naming and how multiple connotations of a name provide depth. Apollo, the Greek god of light, healing, music, and truth is an invocation to the park’s relationship to its history and neighborhood. Socrates Sculpture Park was named by founder Mark di Suvero not only in reverence to the philosopher’s pursuit of truth through knowledge, but also in homage to the vibrant Greek community in the surrounding neighborhood. The power of naming comes into play in the Apollo Theater’s history as well. When it opened in 1914 as Hurtig and Seamon’s New Burlesque Theater, it did not allow African Americans as patrons or performers. That drastically changed in 1934 when the theater began marketing to African Americans and changed its name to the Apollo, signalling a break from its immediate past. In both instances, organizations were named for an idea rather than after an individual. For each, the gesture was an attempt to capture

the collective ethos of a particular moment. The sign’s constantly lit word ‘POLL’ entwines two other histories: the theater’s longstanding Amateur Night program, where audience members rate the evening’s winners with fervent cheers or boos, and the recent populist platform that won the 2016 presidential election. Situated in a public park, the piece engages with conceptions of the public as stage for performance and platform for democracy. The ancient Greek spaces of the arena and the agora reflect these two types of public performance: entertainment and politics. In coupling these paradigms, Ward addresses the contemporary condition in which the capacity to perform is paramount. The ability to articulate one’s ideas, emanate authenticity, and look the part are now considered essential to success in most walks of life. Considering the push and pull among these forces, Apollo/Poll’s tenor is two-fold. On one hand, it suggests that what is held in public trust, which could include everything from parkland to the welfare state system, may be at the mercy of the masses. Yet it simultaneously conjures the illuminative and enlightening power of aesthetics to mobilize and its potential to consolidate a sense of community. Here Ward presents the power of the stage as a double-edged sword: seductive, self-empowering, and slippery. Ward filters this attention-seeking energy through the prism of machismo in Bipartition Bell. A satirical monument, the big balls conjure big ego, guts, aggression, and big mistakes. The bell’s cup brims with the vibrations of a multitude of sounds—the hollow promises of powerful figureheads, the mocking ridicule of political satirists, and silence of a broken bell. Its pounded copper surface, coated with a stately sea green patina, oozes with a particular conservative brand of masculinity, the kind perceived in authoritative institutions and white-haired statesmen. Reminiscent of Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, with a post and lintel frame and a groove in the place of the infamous crack, Bipartition Bell acts as an American landmark for an uncertain time and place. As the Liberty Bell’s crack engendered symbolic readings when it appeared during the Civil War, Bipartition Bell suggests today’s national divide. With phonic similarity to ‘bipartisan bell,’ the work calls forth the recent debates on the efficacy or impotence of the United States’ two-party system. Ward wryly notes that ‘bipartition’ refers to a scrotal condition that may cause sterility in goats. Virility echoes throughout the pieces as if the voice of Muhammad Ali—the trash-talking, rhyme-throwing extraordinaire in and out of

the ring—ricochets between the works, from the heft of Scapegoat to the lime-light of Apollo/Poll, from one G.O.A.T. to another. Ali’s rhetorical prowess ranged from aggrandizing antics and self-promotion as “the greatest of all time” to stinging verbal jabs. His exclamations were directed not only at his athletic opponents but also at American racism, Islamophobia, and Imperialism. And thus the attempted scapegoating of Ali during the height of the civil rights and antiVietnam War movements becomes another history interwoven into the show. Ali’s refusal of U.S. military service by conscientious objection based on his Muslim faith, led to his conviction, the stripping of his title, and suspension from boxing. In 1971 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of his appeal, defending religious freedom, in effect resurrecting him as an emblem of greatness, and to some an emblem of America’s greatness. In the G.O.A.T.s, Robert Rauschenberg’s voice surfaces, as his Monogram (1955-59) features the most well-known goat in recent art history. Writers have noted that Ward shares a sensibility and working method with Rauschenberg, wandering through the city to scavenge materials. In this combine, a taxidermied angora with tire ring around its waist stands on its “pasture,’’ a wood platform painted with reproduced images and objects adhered. This surface is an example of the flatbed picture plane which critic Leo Steinberg coined to describe not only the new orientation for painting, but also a new art-making process and a new paradigm that informed it. Steinberg notes, “The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.”1 While in Monogram, the painting is pasture is pedestal is flatbed picture plane, in Ward’s G.O.A.T.s the park is pasture is pedestal is the planet. Ward’s flatbed picture plane is the topographical surface that extends across the globe like a net stretched taut, pulling in distant places and leaving some gaps blank. In these blank spaces Ward encourages viewers to fill in their own memories, experiences, and subjectivities. If Rauschenberg’s flatbed picture plane was animated by information technologies of the 60s, then Ward’s is the result of the Internet age’s stage of globalization—mediated, stratified, fragmented, and asynchronous. This associative concatenation that Ward’s work instigates is multi-sensory—visual, sonic, haptic—echoing the exuberance of the city that surrounds the park.

Regarding time and history, it’s worth noting that G.O.A.T, again was in development before the presidential election. Rather than reading the show as a direct reaction to the current presidential administration, it may be more accurate to say that it is informed by the underlying and enduring social conditions that influenced its outcome. The line that runs from the polls of 2016 to Ward’s Apollo/Poll is not straight. One must meander and reorient oneself to make connections among them. The Apollo Theater of the 1920s, ancient Greece of mighty gods, the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 60s and 70s, Astoria of the 80s, among others, are entwined in the show. G.O.A.T., again is a meditation on American identity, the democratic impulse, and civic values—bound together through the lens of multiple times, places, and things.

Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” in Other Criteria: Confrontations of Twentieth Century Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

I’ve Known This Time as Other Times. I’ve Known This Place as Other Places by LeRonn Brooks, Art Historian

“You know as an artist not only are you trying to declare a moment for somebody to be aware of themselves and their experience with the world […], in a strange way, it’s really about creating a kind of artifice for them to reflect into.” —Nari Ward

It is easy to think of time as linear or as one moment moving effortlessly into the next in a clear and momentous progression. But nothing is inevitable, not even death. Everything comes back around. I cannot remember now, with certainty, the first time I met Nari Ward but I can say that I’d met him before as other men. I was an undergraduate in Hunter College’s BFA program and barely out of my teens. My brother James had passed four years prior to that first year and my father had begun losing his memories due to Alzheimer’s. If time were a straight line of progression it would have been easier to say that Nari reminded me of the men I know rather than the brother I’d lost and the father I was losing. But loss pointed in both directions, past and future, at that moment. As I worked through my hurt that first year I remember the painting and sculpture studios as sanctuaries, remember them as spaces to gather the pieces, and I remember the development of my creative life being protected by three black men—Roy DeCarava, Juan Sanchez, and Nari Ward; their mentorship meant the world to me. Each was a fragment of the man I wanted to be. After graduation, Nari’s studio became a new sanctuary for the maintenance of my emotional and creative lives; but it was different. There, he and I talked as brothers talk, and, at times, he asked me to work on his projects. To this day he has continued to value me as a man and a maker; looking back it’s become clearer that this has always been so. Time, is not linear; it moves in a currency of crosshatched fragments and opaque registers of memories calling back to who, and what, we’ve lost and gained. This is to say, in part, that friendship is as much as construction as any work of art. But I’d also like to suggest that memory can be activated with purpose. The first time I visited Nari’s studio there were three projects at different stages of conception. I remember the space being clean. I remember there were concrete blocks that brought to mind all the recent construction in Harlem as new condominiums began rising in the skyline of our neighborhood. I remember glaring at the huge vertical LIQUOR light box signs he’d saved from the garbage heaps and thinking they were somehow relics of Harlem in its antiquity. I remember the piles of sneakers, the blackboards, the carriages and so

NARI WARD, West Liqoursoul, 2009 Metal and neon sign, wood with artificial flowers, pvc tubing, shoelaces and shoe tips 124 x 34 x 28 inches Pizzuti Collection Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

many of the other objects heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d collected from the neighborhood as if they were the linear notes of a greater vision, a story with multiple parts. I remember a large vision board with delicate graphite drawings of objects juxtaposed in poetic opposition. I remember the sounds of hammers and table saws matched the local jazz stationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wide palette of sound. And I remember being instructed on how to use a blowtorch

to melt strips of tar with a painter’s feathery touch. Everything, every memory and experience had its place. I remember it all as if Nari were detailing the life of his imagination’s place in the world and that place was never far from the thought of Harlem’s past, present, and future. In retrospect it seems that during those days it occurred to me for the first time that time itself was a construction built of and fortified by the pasts we gather like so many scraps. The body, a body, can be this meeting place—this gathered or sacrificed thing— where memory is activated but never reconciled completely. Like the sensory flashes that form the collage in my father’s brain (the halcyon daydreams and nightmares of his childhood in Jim Crow Alabama calling him home), like the reoccurring number on the clock that marks my brother’s passing, each of us lives with memory’s remnants. Part of what I want to tell you is that the body, its excavation, is how the past reenters the world. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process to myself, perhaps, that the metaphor of G.O.A.T., the scapegoat and the “greatest of all time,” as icons, speaks doubly and triply of sacrifice, satire, politics—past, present, and future. For instance, let’s consider the mythological ideal Apollo and his conceptual relevance here. Apollo is said to have slain the monstrous serpent Python on Mount Parnassus. His temple was raised on the site of the sacrifice (the killing) and now lays in ruin on a large plateau in the shaded nape of the mountain’s south slope. Harlem’s Apollo Theater is located on 125th Street in between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Frederick Douglass Boulevards and sits high on Manhattan bedrock but just below Sugar Hill where legends like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Paul Robeson descended into the world from plush townhouses and large Pre-War apartments. The Apollo (which opened in 1914 but excluded Black audiences until 1934) has over the years become a site akin to a Black secular temple, or an intersection of culture and politics—from iconic musical performance to political fundraisers. At night its iconic rectangular sign flashes a broad beam of sun over the shoulder of the eastern and western faces of 125th Street. For Socrates, Ward has recreated the Apollo Theater’s famous beacon; however, with a poetically insightful twist, as it intermittingly reads both “APOLLO” and “POLL” in red LEDs. The former recognizes the theater (and by extension, Harlem) as an important historical site, while the latter not only connotes its audience’s ability to “vote” for their favorite performers during Amateur Night but it is also a commentary on the politics of the nation itself, such as the controversies and fears

NARI WARD, Silent Mass Violent Whispers, 2001 Roman Theatre San Gimignano Courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua

surrounding the recent presidential election. One, a cultural jewel and the other evoking the possible ruin of an entire nation and the erosion of its moral and civic identities. And conversely, as gentrification’s political and economic realities rapidly change Harlem’s communal landscape, displaced communities are left to wonder whether their dissenting voices are heard at all. That the sign is made of advertising vinyl layers the aura of mythology with synthetic light, consumerist marketing, and artifice. Culture, can also be a ruin. The Temple of Apollo was destroyed and rebuilt three times, with the fourth temple (nearly destroyed in 373 B.C.) bearing the inscription, “Know Thyself ” above one of its three entrances. The temple’s first oracle appeared to a shepherd whose goats acted strangely as he neared the diviner. Soon after, the shepherd was overcome with the same mysterious force and began speaking of thenpresent and future events. Ward’s goat sculptures and installations tell similarly of the present and future, but also the past. His lifesize concrete goat sculptures (formed in casts) are broad metaphors for past histories of ruin and prophetic symbols of its possibility as if to say ‘we, as a society, will know ourselves and our limitations by confronting histories of our recklessness and bearing witness to what we’ve sacrificed.’ Around the park life-size goats stand guard and channel the memory of the attendant sculptures that lined ancient

NARI WARD, Crusader, 2005 plastic bags, metal, shopping cart, trophy elements, bitumen, chandelier, and plastic containers 110 x 51 x 52 inches Collection of Brooklyn Museum; Purchased with funds given by Giulia Borghese Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Western sanctuaries. Under their watch lay the remnants of the martyr, or emblematic culprit, a once totemic goat-figure. But nothing is wasted or sacrosanct here. Every part of the goat, its head (Scapegoat), its gonads (Bipartition Bell), suggests the potential to raise awareness of our individual participation in systems of collective beliefs. However, Ward’s treatment of these parts—such as a tiny bell inside a large gonad-shaped oxidized and hammered copper shell or a twelve-foot goat-headed hobby horse, the pole emerging from its neck reminiscent of a flayed bone or the stripped structural beam of an ancient monolith—allows

for nuance, suggesting that each part has inherent value and bares imaginative possibilities that multiply with sustained engagement. Each works’ meaning unfolds as you process its parts: Look-towitness and you will “see.” And as Apollo once slew Python, we—our untrustworthy politicians, our consumerist greed, our apathy—have slain the goat, and the G.O.A.T.s, as the marketplace continues to appropriate both the Oracle’s voice and moral authority. Ward’s goats are therefore premonitions of future paths we have traveled before. Time has never been linear, but it seems ruins are inevitable when memory activates the wreckage as the past rises. Everything -comes back around.

LeRonn P. Brooks is Assistant Professor, Department of Africana Studies, Lehman College of the City University of New York.

Blason for Nari by Paolo Javier, Poet

I welcome my future hour Simple open sea When each word each gesture will liven Your face like that of a blond goat Foraging in the intoxicating vat of my hand — Aimé Césaire where G.O.A.T. is missing where G.O.A.T. is born where G.O.A.T. is key where G.O.A.T. is growing where G.O.A.T. is lit where G.O.A.T. is here where G.O.A.T. is with child where G.O.A.T. is message a person named Neruda from Kartikeya sends: “where G.O.A.T. is crowned king while subjects party” where G.O.A.T. is gray with black stockings where G.O.A.T. is awl where G.O.A.T. is connector to “because” where G.O.A.T. is lawnmower where G.O.A.T. is destruction buoyed by four red wings where G.O.A.T. is mint condition with original locking crate where G.O.A.T. is mist mild lust personifies where G.O.A.T. is bursting under sign of hearth where G.O.A.T. is umbrella on August bank holiday Monday at the Mcgillycuddy Reeks where G.O.A.T. is dot org happy to craft beautiful court summons where G.O.A.T. is shell where G.O.A.T. is atonement for violence against commandments where G.O.A.T. is set going up hill not downhole where G.O.A.T. sits in oats where G.O.A.T. is tail where G.O.A.T. stands tall on old furs where G.O.A.T. stages the most mesmerizing Broadway production ever to hit Vernon

2 Yes Perfect Moment for Pan to Present Themselves Here at Hellgate Steel Scraper Beauty Out of Reach Bark Abstraction Gizzard Spun Haptic Magickal Effrontery Thought Id Get a Break Just Clean the Palette Of Hellgate Secondary But These Students Achieve Neverland Light Up Fragment the Breeze Um Pan Is Recombining Pools of Rainwater Gather Sky Visible on Surface Goat God Upside Down Bound in Rusty Wire Im Gonna Cut Across The Flood Now Behold the Other God Apollo 3 G.O.A.T. God Pan return now to haunt the Worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wild Places by Socrates G.O.A.T. God Pan the mountain on a mule G.O.A.T. God Pan enhance eight hundred forty five annotations linked to Encyclopedia of Lovecraftian Self G.O.A.T. God Pan the dangerous dwelling within the protected zone of Community G.O.A.T. God Pan reeling around fountain of Faerie and Cherubim G.O.A.T. God Pan enough to curl beard wrinkle eyelashes G.O.A.T. God Pan the lord of weekend flock and live music G.O.A.T. God Pan reestablish scene of families own True Light G.O.A.T. God Pan for finale iron portcullis spikes tear open the belly of this poem

Paolo Javier is a poet living and working in Queens. He was the Queens poet laureate from 2010 to 2014.

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Fig.44-48 Preparatory Drawings Fig. 44: Apollo/Poll Socrates Proposal, 2016 Graphite on paper 8 ½ x 11 inches Fig. 45: G.O.A.T. Preparatory Sketch, 2016 Photocopy and white out 8 x 8 inches Fig. 46: Scapegoat (Colossus Hobby Goat Toy) Socrates Proposal, 2016 Graphite on paper 11 x 8 ½ inches Fig. 47: Bipartition Bell Socrates Proposal, 2016 Graphite on paper 8 ½ x 11 inches Fig. 48: Shun-Light Socrates Proposal, 2016 Graphite on paper with photo collage 8 ½ x 11 inches

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Interview with NARI WARD Jess Wilcox: This interview will be centered around your choice of materials because one of your trademark strategies is to defamiliarize everyday materials. There are certain materials that you return to again and again and have become signature materials for you. I want to ask you to unpack the ideas behind some of the recurring materials that appear in G.O.A.T. again and have also appeared in past projects. A good start would be your use of fire hose in Scapegoat, which you wrap in a spiral around its neck. Of all the materials that have come to be identified with your practice, fire hose is at the top because it was in some of your most iconic pieces, Amazing Grace (1993), in the 1993 Venice Biennale piece, Exodus (1993), as well as Happy Smilers (1996). You used it in different ways in eachâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; wrapped in Happy Smilers, then in Amazing Grace it was on the floor, like guidelinesâ&#x20AC;Ś Nari Ward: Yes, and on the floor and entangled at the center binding the baby strollers.

JW: First of all, whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your attraction to fire hoses? And since you made those pieces in the 1990s, how has your relationship to fire hose evolved? Has it meant something different to you across different periods and different pieces?

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NARI WARD, Happy Smilers - Duty Free Shopping, 1996 awning, soda bottles, fire hose, fire escape, salt, household elements, audio recording, speakers, and aloe vera plant dimensions variable Installation view, Jeffrey Deitch, March 7-April 6 1996 Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

NW: Yeah, it has changed. What I like about the fire hose is that it

has a lot of symbolic potential, like the correlation between fire and water, transformations that are key to life. The sociopolitical content also relates to the civil rights movement and the images of protesters in Birmingham, Alabama being blasted with water from fire hoses. I also like that it’s an industrial material, but by manipulating it, putting tension in it, it can be perceived as organic, or even bodily, so that relates to entrails or innards. It’s also easily identifiable. Everyone knows what a fire hose is, but their experience with it is limited. Even though they have that background of particular meanings, there’s the question: when would you see that? I like materials that become dysfunctional or can’t be reused. What is the new purpose that I can give them? It really comes down to the material having a kind of resonance for me. As a material, being really malleable. It’s also easy to work with, in that you just screw it onto things, making it easy to close or conceal. So like in the Exodus pieces, I used the hose to make a carrier for objects. I’d wrap cardboard boxes and burned boxes, and in the end the fire would fuse the hose together. It became an interesting way to almost

weld them. That approach was necessary because I wanted to create a vessel. Mystery is the other part. You take that thing that is vaguely familiar and bring the viewer into a space they don’t know, then mystery becomes more intense. I wanted the fire hose to become a cylindrical pole for the Scapegoat character. It was strange enough that when people come across it they would want to consider, what is this thing?

JW: Do you feel like you used it differently in those earlier pieces or has there been continuity?

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NW: No, I’m using it differently now. I’m trying to reconsider how to intensify its functionality. This thing acts as a type of sleeve, like the way a bicycle handle is wrapped. Also it protects the form. And if I keep doing it, if it’s large enough, what does that invented function become? In the case of Scapegoat a neck or a base for a head.

NARI WARD, Fortress, 2002 Glass, metal, cement, water Installation at Spoleto Festival, 2002 Charleston, SC Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

JW: Let’s move on to concrete, the primary component of

the G.O.A.T.s and Scapegoat’s head, which is a material that you haven’t used as much. I noticed it in your most recent public

work, Smart Tree (2016) at the High Line in New York, and in Fortress (2002), a piece for the Spoleto Festival USA in South Carolina. Beyond the practical reason that these were all outdoor pieces and concrete endures, what’s your attraction?

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NARI WARD, Breathing Panel: Oriented Right, 2015 oak wood, copper sheet, copper nails, darkening patina 96 x 120 x 2.25 inches (overall) Collection of Allison and Larry Berg Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

NW: What I especially like from the Spoleto dialogue is that concrete can be contaminated and still hold its structural integrity. You can put things inside of it—color, material, aggregate. There’s a layering in my weaving of material, even the fire hose, that I can also approximate with the concrete. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s not soft or yielding. But then when I add other things to it, I can contaminate it and make it feel like it wants to transition. I like its alchemical component. That appeals to my interest in what the work can do or become. There’s something about putting this thing and that thing in there and mixing it all together and having it become a form that I can continue working with.

JW: And that transformative moment of turning materials

into art, it seems like that’s a corollary of what making art, as a practice, can do. Art potentially has some alchemical power as well.

NW: Yes, a power, hopefully, to affect the viewer’s space. That’s a rare expectation. You go to see art for a revelatory or introspective moment but there are few places that alchemical experience can happen. JW: That’s true. Back to concrete for a moment, I’ve noticed VIII

a lot of your work speaks to mobility. There are lots of wheels, for instance. For me the first feeling one gets from concrete is an overwhelming weightiness. It suggests permanence, stability, but also lack of movement or an impediment. Do you also get that connotation from concrete?

NW: In the instances I’ve worked with it, it has been about the impediment, lack of movement, or the sense of trying to be fixed, even if you’re not totally able to. For instance, the pieces that I’m working on in the studio, they are ladders that are almost submerged in concrete and the subtext is the notion of inaccessibility. One can’t access the rungs, or ascend. JW: So a metaphor for social mobility as well? NW: Right. It works for me in that sense too. The physicality, the duress, that it’s not easy to move around, is really important. The wheel is always part of a larger conversation. If you think about Constantin Brancusi and the pedestal, that notion of display ties into a particular expectation of object and place. If you’re coming from a culture, like me, where you’re not convinced that that history is geared toward your understanding of the world, then you might want something that’s a little more slippery. By slippery I mean something that can be more portable and navigable. For me, things with wheels make more sense than something stuck in one place. Then the object is not about one particular moment and place but about different moments. That’s why there are all these pieces with wheels—Savior (1996), Crusader (2005), and Smart Tree (2016)—and maybe that’s why I was attracted to the baby strollers too.

JW: Yes. You’ve also made several pieces that incorporate

elements of cars, such as mufflers and tires, as well as whole vehicles—the hearse surrounded by piles of mufflers and exhaust pipes and installed inside a cage-like structure in Peacekeeper (1995), the ambulance in the LIV ESupport show (2010), the bus in Bus Park (2002-2003). Why do you keep returning to the vehicle? Does it relate to mobility in a larger sense or a more abstracted sense of perhaps movement?

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NW: Well back to the idea of the wheel, I remember in Jamaica we used to make our own tires. It’s something my brothers did when making push carts to sell things. The guys on the street would take a ball bearing, then cut up a tire and make a wheel. For me that idea of making a circle becomes a symbol 94 of life and all that it represents. A guiding notion of mine is that you can make your way out of something. The wheel is the first thing that I latched onto as a form, then it developed into the shopping cart, then the hearse. JW: So the idea actually traveled? NW: Right. A lot of my work comes from a very personal, maybe even

hermetic space, and then my challenge is to open it up for others. That’s the hard part.

JW: I definitely see connections to larger questions of mobility —refugees and forced migration—and also just the condition of the globalized world. For instance, one hundred years ago artists weren’t flying all over to biennials. If one wanted to see art in Europe, you took the boat over and that took several weeks.

NW: Wheels aren’t always about the body moving as much as they are the thing that might be able to move. The typical art experience is that you come into a space to see a thing, and your experience with that thing depends on your movement, but that never seemed like enough to me. It should be that that thing also moves, that that thing should be different. I also always consider the object’s power and that its power is defined by its relationship to change.

JW: Is that power agency? NW: Yeah, exactly. Agency is something that the artist gives the object, and people relate to it. To make that agency more dynamic, it shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be in one place, but should suggest the possibility of other places.

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NARI WARD, Liberty and Orders, 2012 Installation view, Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, New York March 29-April 21, 2012 Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

JW:

Yes, absolutely. Onto another material: copper. I believe the first time you used it was in the 2015 exhibition Breathing Directions at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, with pieces inspired by Congolese cosmograms that you encountered at First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, which was also an Underground Railroad site. Now youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re using it at Socrates in Bipartition Bell, but in a very different way. Could you talk about copper and oxidation in those pieces? Because I feel like you approach each uniquely.

NW: In Breathing Panels copper was a metaphor for healing. When I started working with copper, I found that I liked the ability to patina, rather than paint. I discovered a way to change the surface by reaction with water,

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which would trigger the copper’s own properties. I also liked the association with healing the body. Then it came back around to bodies, and I realized I could stretch it. That seduced me to continuing to work with it. In Breathing Panels the copper created these really pristine fields or pictorial planes. So for the bell, I wanted to make this an object and give it more volume, distinct from the panels that were about flatness and the void. By continuing with copper, I shifted to take on space and consider the material as aestheticized form. Beating up the bell gave it texture. In all this work, I think about it sonically. What kind of texture does it sound like? If that texture is loud, physical, and present, how can I make another line or texture that’s more delicate? I’m always trying to balance something. For G.O.A.T., again, the desire to make an anatomical form in copper, meaning the scrotum, was also aligned with wanting to evoke the Liberty Bell, and even more the Statue 96 of Liberty, in that it is green. It all came together that it should be copper.

JW: Following up on the idea of patina, in a 2012 Brooklyn Rail interview between you and Phong Bui, you mention this word in relationship to some African figurines sold on the street that were faux-aged with patina, which made me think about this bell. I was reminded of this because even though the copper will oxidize on its own you have sped up the process by spraying it with chemicals. The patina then serves as a cloak of authenticity, and a symbol of age and distinction. Thus the bell seems to be about the fauxauthentic. In that way it seems like you’re engaged with artifice in some way. NW: I’m not so judgmental about artifice. I did a project called Blacktop

Man: Bootleg version (2006) that was about the validation of fictional or fake consumer goods. While criminalized for breaking the law, as an artist I like the mischievous nature of the bootleg object, that you can’t have a Gucci or a Prada, but you can have the brand. You may not have the real thing but if you have enough swagger, then you can pull it off. I see it and think, “that’s art!” To me it’s more interesting than if it was the real thing because the people who can’t afford those products can have the fiction of owning it. That’s powerful. There are interesting possibilities in the artifice that speaks to one’s imaginative projection into reality. When I’m creating these fake surfaces in the bell it’s all about that projection. The realness of it is not that it becomes that thing, and this gets back to the discussion of the flux of things, but that there are moments before and after you experience that thing that are just as

important as the thing itself. So the context is key, as Duchamp let us know, and sometimes more important than the thing itself. Context is somewhat in the artist’s control and somewhat outside of it. That’s the ultimate excitement and challenge of doing something in a public space.

JW:

Yes, at Socrates there are multiple contexts. There’s the landscape, the river, the city. Then specifically, there’s Queens. There’s New York, then out one step further, the United States, 2017.

NW: And those combinations create for the viewer the validation of that

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thing.

JW: One last thing about copper. It’s a naturally occurring

elemental metal and a key component of bronze, the ultimate monument material, but it also has conductive properties and is used in electronics. In an interview with Joseph Thompson about Sub Mirage Lignum (2012) at MASS Moca you mentioned the idea of potential in connection with Mango Tourist, a series of snowmen that incorporate electronic resistors and capacitors. Do you see copper’s conductive properties and potential energy in your copper pieces, both Breathing Panels and Bipartition Bell?

NW: I want to believe all of it. If you as a viewer believe that there is something intrinsic to the material that can affect the body, then it can. So like believing anything, you have to be in the narrative with it. JW: You have to believe it to activate the potential. NW: Yeah. That’s probably my objective of all the work. I’m a Gemini, so there’s a part of me that is there 120% and a part of me that’s standing outside saying ‘get back out there, so we have to go home’ (laughing). There’s a happy balance between those two sides. I’m pleased being totally invested in something and having a formal dialogue with it. Combining a spiritual immersion and a more gestural conversation is what I’m trying to negotiate as well. That’s why I like rituals. They insinuate and suggest an unknown and mystery, and incorporate an action that is evidence to that object. I think

that’s all my work is. The thing that makes it work is that I need for folks to believe. All my decisions are based on trying to carve that belief, or create that investment.

JW: Another material that you use and may resonate with this

idea of belief or the spiritual is light. It’s used in Apollo / Poll and in Shun-Light but with different tones. The former has more of a red glow or emanation and the latter involves more reflection or shine. There is also Illuminated Sanctuary of Empty Sins (2001), a translucent alabaster covered caravan with a warm gauzy candlelit interior, created in Poggibonsi, Italy, near the site of incinerator waste.

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NW: For me light is about declaring an anticipatory space. As in the

LiquorSoul (2010) sign pieces, it’s about what’s coming, or what is witnessed that defines the possibility of the future. Shun-Light is similar in that it’s lighting or hiding a secret. It isn’t about revealing more, but about keeping the secret poignant or charged. It’s all about the viewer giving that thing power, which is similar to the dialogue with Mango Tourist. These things in some way are powered by your expectation of them, more than any power in itself.

JW: In Shun-Light you use another loaded material. I’m thinking of tar or bitumen. The first appearance of tar that I recognized in one of your pieces is in Peacekeeper shown in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. You’ve since used tar in Crusader, a shopping cart with grease-smeared plastic gas containers on the outside, a chandelier, and weave of melted plastic bags. You used the same material in various stages or phases. NW: In Crusader it was all about trying to mediate anxiety of the Iraq War with all these iterations of a petroleum-based medium and then doing a performance in front of the Mobile Gas Station. The idea is that the ritualized material possesses a kind of animism or energy. Tar is really exciting because it comes back to mark-making. I actually went to school for drawing, not sculpture. Tar is a way to make that mark, give it form, and give it meaning as it relates to the everyday experience of the viewer. I can burn tar down and it’s not necessarily painting. Everything is a conversation pushing back on painting. Not that I don’t like painting, but painting is

about a covering, or color, and a dialogue with surface. I prefer to burn something down so that it’s integrated into the material, rather than topically painted.

JW: It’s fused.

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NW: Yes that’s a key word. It has a different intensity. Sometimes I wish I could be a painter. I teach at Hunter College and I’m always asked, ‘why are you so against painting?’ or ‘why do you hate painting?’ I don’t hate painting, I find it very inspiring and it helps me define what I am and what I’m not. And I’m not a painter. It’s a discipline that I have a great deal of respect for but I usually don’t identify with the process. JW: So then let’s talk about the recent reparation show at Lehmann Maupin in New York and those paintings.

NW: Thank you for bringing that up. With the Till pieces, the drawers really turn the paintings into this relief work. Then the paintings become frames for this object, which I wanted to give a devotional component to. JW: Yes, the reliefs function almost like an altar-piece. NW: Yes, they are emanations that support the cash till. JW: And for you what’s the relationship between reparations and the title?

NW: I thought of like when you’re tilling soil you are preparing it for seed, for future growth. You are maintaining the earth. So it’s a way to suggest maintenance and moral responsibility.

JW: One last material. Language could easily be conceived

of as one of your materials. And wordplay—both in your titles and visual puns—has been under-examined.

NW: I think wordplay is a human thing. If we consider its use by rappers,

poets and comedians. Everybody does it. Depending on your profession, you may be asked to chill on it. The more you’re outside the mainstream or expected, you find folks who embrace wordplay. If you have a certain kind of job you may not be permitted to speak Ebonics or some version of the English language. I think we get forced to conform into boxes. We get tired and accept that this is the English language and I’m not going to change it. But I think language is always evolving and doing what we’re continually trying to express, now more than ever with social media.

JW: I also think there’s a poetics to your work that goes VIII

beyond syntax, but conveys a playfulness. You have a lot of titles that sound like something else, like Shun-Light, not sunlight, or Bipartition Bell, not bipartisan bell, not bifurcated bell.

NW: Maybe because I grew up in a dual language environment. Not a bilingual world, like English and French, one after another. In Patois there’s Spanish, English, French, and African languages, and they come in and out. It’s easy for me to use these as ingredients since I don’t see a hierarchy. As an artist I mix those things up so that people reconsider their assumptions, so they use their brains and their eyes, even if they present contradictions. JW: The last question is about the trajectory of your work over time. Earlier in your career you were well known for large-scale installation and often took over whole galleries. I’m thinking of the immersive environments incorporating sound, like Amazing Grace and Happy Smilers. The more recent exhibitions Liberty and Orders (2012) and LIV ESupport may be better thought of as discrete objects in conversation among each other.

NW: Well they were also in the white cube. JW: Yes. But they also felt a little bit like essays to me. Liberty

and Orders was about the law, authority, vigilance, and American ideas of freedom and LIV ESupport about care, wellness and support, physically, socially, and spiritually. Each focused on a topic and each work guided the viewer towards a thesis. So I’m curious where you see G.O.A.T., again in this spectrum?

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NW: G.O.A.T., again is me going back to my roots. This anxiety and doubt about systems of power and feelings of ineffectiveness reminds me of other moments when I’ve been overwhelmed. That’s what the biennials were like. I used to joke that I was on the biennial circuit, like it was a traveling circus, and I was there as a kind of entertainer slash cultural provider slash national representative. JW: Performing your role. NW: Yes. It is that kind of space, like, “Here now, it’s your turn. Lights, VIII

camera.” But at Socrates it’s on a grand scale. Even more than a solo show, because indoor shows give you rooms to guide your essay, I like your description. The rooms coordinate how the ideas will play out, but in the Park you have the expanse of sky, water, and land.

JW: And then the public. NW: So here, the G.O.A.T.s became the room. They frame the conversation

in a way that is both revelatory and a relief because I didn’t know how I was going to hold down the landscape. Once I found the goats, I allowed myself to play and let them make their own logic.

JW: To me the scale feels like a biennial, but the show is less

discrete than some of your past biennial works. In G.O.A.T., again it seems like you’re introducing your method of essayistic gallery show to the outdoors, given these individual objects are in conversation with each other. Unlike most biennials, it’s siteresponsive, not exactly site-specific. I say that because these works could travel elsewhere and still make sense.

NW: The conversation is there because the works do reframe each other. A goat takes something from the bell. The bell takes something from the goat and so forth. JW: I’d like to think the show works in a totally new way.

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NW: Yes. I think it’s both new and old. Maybe that’s why I was trying to figure out where the show would take me. That’s why I reflect on my past experience. There is a bit of using big ideas about big things here, but there is some intimacy that I was able to offer with the rebar. They’re like a shishkabob of the past. The playfulness is also something I like the audience to potentially engage with. That’s what you want from being in the public. You want them to get involved.

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Fig. 49: Production of Apollo / Poll sign Fig. 50: Installation of Apollo / Poll Fig. 51: Pounding copper onto Bipartition Bell Fig. 52: Moving Bipartition Bell for installation Fig. 53: Installation of Shun-Light Fig. 54: Capping the roof of Shun-Light Fig. 55: A discussion about lighting the chandelier for Shun-Light Fig. 56: Interior of Shun-Light Fig. 57: Building of Shun-Light frame

Fig. 49-65 Production Images

Fig. 58: Production of Scapegoat ears Fig. 59: Scapegoat armature before stucco application Fig. 60: Partially wrapped Scapegoat neck Fig. 61: Illustration of Scapegoat modeling by Chris Zirbes Fig. 62: Illustration of Scapegoat head production by Chris Zirbes Fig. 63: G.O.A.T. cast fresh out of the mold Fig. 64: Installation of G.O.A.T. at shoreline Fig. 65: G.O.A.T.s in the snow before rebar application

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About NARI WARD Nari Ward was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica and currently lives and works in Harlem, New York. Ward’s work examines issues surrounding cultural identity and empowerment, social disenfranchisement, consumer culture and the circulation of materials and objects. The urban environment, in its textures, grit, colors, sounds, and a site of interpersonal and cultural exchange, is a recurrent subject in his work. He frequently repurposes familiar materials such as fire hose, bottles, shoes, shopping carts, tires, and keys, transforming their meaning through accumulation and recontextualization. Ward’s open ended work encourages multifold associative interpretations. Ward has a BA from Hunter College, and a MFA from Brooklyn College. A major survey exhibition was organized at Pérez Art Museum Miami (2015), and traveled to The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2016), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017). Other solo exhibitions have been presented at the Savannah College of Art and Design

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Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2015); Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, LA (2014); The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2011); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2011); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2002); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2001, 2000). He has participated in group exhibitions throughout the country and the globe such as Black: Color, Material, Concept, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015); NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, New Museum, New York (2013); Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Rotunda, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2006); and Landings, Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany (2003), among others. Â Wardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is in various international collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges, Istanbul Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. He has received numerous awards and honors including the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts (2017), Joyce Award (2015), the Rome Prize (2012), Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (1996), and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1992). Ward has also received commissions from the New-York Historical Society, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization.

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Colophon Socrates Sculpture Park

Â Socrates Sculpture Park is a community engaged New York City waterfront park dedicated to supporting artists in the production and presentation of public art. Since 1986 Socrates Sculpture Park has been a model of public art production, community activism, and socially inspired place-making. Known for fostering experimental and visionary artworks, the Park has exhibited more than 1,000 artists on its five waterfront acres, providing them financial and material resources and outdoor studio facilities to create large-scale artworks on site.

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Socrates is free and open to the public 365 days a year from 9am to sunset and is located at the intersection of Broadway and Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City, New York.

Support & Thanks

The exhibition is made possible with generous support from the Lambent Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, and the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation; with additional support provided by Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana; Roberta and Steven Denning; and Spacetime, C.C. The exhibition is also supported, in part, by public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. This publication is supported by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

Board of Directors XI

Stuart Match Suna, President Robert F. Goldrich, Vice President Ivana Mestrovic, Secretary & Treasurer Maxine Frankel Richard Gluckman, FAIA Deidrea Miller Brooke Kamin Rapaport Ursula von Rydingsvard Joel Shapiro Thomas W. Smith Kimberly Strong Mitchell Silver, Ex-Officio NYC Parks Commissioner Mark di Suvero, Chair Emeritus

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Staff John Hatfield, Executive Director Audrey Dimola, Director of Public Programs Katie Denny Horowitz, Director of External Affairs Terrence McCutchen, Operations Assistant Sara Morgan, Development & Communications Assistant Maya Reyes, Arts Education Fellow Jess Wilcox, Director of Exhibitions Chris Zirbes, Studio & Facilities Manager

Production

Heather David Kyle Keays-Hagermann Peter Hoffmeister Daniel Alexander Matthew Andy Overton Eric Patten Powerhouse Productions, Detroit, MI Sara Sciabbarrasi Eli Slaydon Frank Spigner Rashawn Ward All artworks are by Nari Ward unless otherwise noted and all Nari Ward works reproduced in this publication are copyright of the artist. Unless otherwise noted all works are courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin Gallery and Galleria Continua.

Photography XI

Design Printed

By figure number: Fig. 52: Heather David; Fig. 13, 15, 19: Katie Denny Horowitz; Fig. 26, 34: Matthew Herrmann; Fig. 27, portrait of Nari Ward (p. 107): Lee Jaffe; Fig. 9-12, 16-18, 20, 22-23, 28, 33, 36, 38-39, 43: Nicholas Knight; Fig. 1-8, 14, 21, 24-25, 29-32, 35, 37, 42, 53, 54, 56, 58, 63-64: Sara Morgan; Fig. 3, 2, 7, 40-41, 49, 51, 55, 57, 59-60, 65: Jess Wilcox Fay Kolokytha The Print House, Inc, Brooklyn, NY Edition of 600

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This publication was produced on the occasion of the exhibition Nari Ward: G.O.A.T., again, organized by Socrates Sculpture Park and curated by Jess Wilcox, Director of Exhibitions.

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