Nari Ward is a contemporary Jamaican-born American artist who uses sculpture, installation, and painting to engage with the cultural sites his art occupies. Following in the Dadaist tradition of Marcel Duchamp, Ward activates found objects as vehicles for cultural commentary. This tactic is exhibited in the artist’s iconic installation Amazing Grace (1993), which was originally designed for an abandoned fire station in Harlem. Consisting of found baby strollers and used firehoses, the discarded objects address issues of poverty and consumer culture. “I don’t want to sit in judgment,” Ward responded when asked about the relationship of his art to the political climate. “But I do want to create work that has a drama, that talks about failure and missed expectations.” Born in St. Andrew, Jamaica in 1963, Ward went on to earn his BA from Hunter College in New York in 1991 and his MFA from Brooklyn College the following year. While living in Harlem in the early 1990s, he befriended a number of acclaimed black artists, among them David Hammons, a long-time resident of the neighborhood. Along with Ward’s notable solo exhibitions at the ICA in Boston and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, his works are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Istanbul Modern in Turkey, among others. The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY.