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African American Voices
John Haberin New York City
Nari Ward and Wilmer Wilson IV
When it comes to Nari Ward, it can take a long time to hear so many voices. They are everywhere in his retrospective at the New Museum, for anyone willing to listen.
A tanning bed made from oil drums calls out not the work's title, Glory, but an insistent "Hey, come on over here." Sons recite their Miranda rights, in a muffled audio, to their very own father, in full dress as a retired policeman. Mahalia Jackson sings "Amazing Grace" over empty baby carriages in the outline of a slave ship. Just three words from the Constitution supply the show's title, "We the People," with every one of those people aching to be heard. In each case, the voices call attention to the silence that they can never quite break. And Ward has one listening to that as well, while Wilmer Wilson IV dares you to penetrate the silence. 
Broken and battered
Nari Ward has made sculpture and assemblage from the voices of Harlem for more than twenty-five years. He has displayed a replica of the sign outside the Apollo Theater. He has welcomed Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery uptown with the burnt-out sign from a liquor store. He has scavenged the streets time and time again, as for those baby carriages. He first exhibited them in an abandoned Harlem firehouse, and fire hoses carpet the paths between them. He has since taken that space as his studio.
He piles more broken and battered items into shopping carts, including a chandelier and a family album. They could stand for ordinary shoppers and residents, to signal the area's vitality, or for the homeless—and Ward fully intends to represent both. A man pushes a cart down the street on video, where a split screen allows for both his point of view and the jaded observer's. Again and again, works take more than one perspective on the same action. Again and again, too, they ask whether anyone is listening. The sons address an absent audience at Al Sharpton's House of Justice, also in Harlem, and a hand fondles their father's uniform before the camera draws back and the officer turns away.
Ward may speak to the neighborhood more than anyone in art since James Van Der Zee, Romare Bearden, and the Harlem Renaissance. He began as an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and never left town. At the Venice Biennale in 1993, he set out lumpy bundles of unstated contents, as "vessels" for others to fill. To judge by an abraded shield on the back wall, others may have already filled them before dying. He grew up in Jamaica, though, and he created his own branch of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2004. He did not become an American citizen until some eight years later, just short of age fifty.
He searches Harlem obsessively for signs of life, as if searching for his roots. Yet he takes a longer perspective as well. The ship's hull alludes to slavery, but also to African traditions left behind. Bottles hang from the ceiling, as if from that burnt-out liquor store, but in the shape of a rack to ward off evil spirits. Holes in Ward's work closest to abstraction mime a Congolese symbol. They also serve as "breathing holes," where breathing cannot be easy.
He follows African American history to Savannah, Georgia, where freed slaves founded a Baptist church. It appears on video behind a piano that could well have accompanied Sunday services. For all that, Ward's Caribbean homeland enters just once. Cans labeled Black Smiles and Jamaican Smiles allude to the stereotype of a happy Jamaican and to shoe polish for a happy performer in blackface. Do not, though, take that for the last word, in an artist constantly revisiting his own work along with history. Even now, with so much behind him, he is still finding his voice.
He keeps finding other voices, too. Even with three floors, the New Museum cannot contain them all. Large installations restrict their number to under fifty. They cannot include the liquor sign or much that has appeared at the Studio Museum, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and in Chelsea, so I must leave more to past reviews linked here. And the works thrive on time and space. They grow into their new homes with ease.
Who are we?
At the heart of everything is a dual question: who speaks for us, as immigrants or as Americans, and who are we? It appears in that pretend INS office, where even you must apply for admission. It appears explicitly in the preamble to the Constitution, which could also serve as preamble to the show. Ward wove those first three words from shoelaces, the kind that supply sneakers to kids who may never have read them. Are we the people a unity, a diversity, or a fiction, and who might it forcibly exclude?
Ward is not just chiding white America. The laces drip down while outlining the fancy, familiar typeface in the color of the streets. Is the union unraveling or just now coming together and teeming with life? What about the liquor store whose flashing letters spell out SOUL? What, for that matter, about the Apollo Theater, whose central letters spell out POLL? Do they serve as a reminder that hope resides in Harlem's cultural history and the voting booth—or that a poll tax long barred African Americans from having a voice?
I missed the last possibility when I first saw the sign in Queens—much as I missed the frequent allusions to America's promise in stars, stripes, and eagles, as if the tanning bed were searing them into African American flesh. I also saw a troubling parallel to art's "bad boys," like Matthew Barney. And Ward did exhibit along with Barney, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Gabriel Orozco in Venice. This is not, though, just trash art and macho boasting. Textile patterns in several works alone would preclude that. Besides, he also exhibited in Venice with Janine Antoni, and he collaborated with her on a Hunger Cradle for the firehouse.
Nor is the work simply angry on the one hand or affirmative on the other. Hunger has both positive and negative associations, between a hunger for achievement and desperation for the next meal. Carpet Angel, created for the New Museum back in 1992, floats above a loose pile of carpeting, plastic bags, plastic bottles, and heavy screws. Its shape could confirm equally to an angel's wings or a worldly robe. It is about transcendence, but not an escape from the tangle and disruption of this world. The black pride of Kehinde Wiley and the Obama state portraits seems far away.
The curators, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni with Edlis Neeson and Helga Christoffersen, compare the angel to stained fabric by Sam Gilliam. They also compare the wall reliefs to tilings by Jack Whitten and the dark, fragile spaces of Lee Bontecou. Ward's black chandeliers have a counterpart in Jeanne Silverthorne as well. Like them all, he retains Modernism's vocabulary while sprawling and shouting in all directions. Not everything works, because that can get out of hand. He is, though, patiently asking to be heard.
Old work may also take on new lives—and not just as Ward recycles materials and adapts them to new spaces. The INS office has new relevance between Donald J. Trump's demands for a border wall and the demands of others to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The baby carriages evoke a whole new wave of gentrification in Harlem, as does a grandfather clock with an African statue in its base. It is hard now to hear "Amazing Grace" without thinking of a moving speech by Barak Obama. Not that Ward is so prescient, but rather that past problems keep returning. We the people are still asking why.
On pins and needles
Within a single work, Wilmer Wilson IV can employ close to a thousand staples, but he still dares you to ask what holds it together. He may well be daring himself and his subjects to ask the same about their lives. They still have a formidable presence. Approaching the work, you can see countless bits of metal crossing and pushing up against one another. I am only guessing how many, but Wilson is good at challenges. You are unlikely to need a warning not to touch.
If they were not staples, he could literally have you on pins and needles. As it is, you must weigh their sharp points and fragmentation against their collective mass. You must also weigh their collective darkness against their shine. They cover paper, loosely mounted on light wood, for a different kind of mass. Before long colors start to appear from within, for a different kind of shine as well. Broad areas of wood outside the staples and the paper also serve as a massive frame and link adjacent works together.
Step back or glance back to a different work, and the colors start to cohere into an image. The papers are prints, and their subjects are people. I could make out group portraits, both casually and formally dressed, and what I think is a single subject in bed. Another has surrounding text, like a wanted poster. They could be Wilson's friends, but I could not say for sure how much they feel at ease—and at least one figure appears to be under brutal arrest. In African American art about African Americans, he can fairly demand that you ask that, too.
Wilson has not had long to employ all those staples. Not yet thirty in 2018, he appeared among emerging artists in the New Museum Triennial. That may suggest a young man in a hurry, and so do huge prints in the back room, on facing vinyl walls. He photographed what he saw on the street as he sped past, perhaps on a bus in Philadelphia, like the one he used for a past performance. He means, though, to slow you down, just as you slow down to make out his subjects. The streets and their single inhabitant become close to abstraction, in streaks of vibrant color, but also looming presences.
A third body of work, in daubs of black ink on paper, might or might not be hulking bodies, too, if not petals blown together by the wind. They might be threats or threatened, shrouded or bound. Wilson could be offering an antidote to the easy reassurance of black men as rising stars for Kehinde Wiley—or the Obama state portraits by Wiley and Amy Sherald. In other past work, Wilson covered himself with hydrogen peroxide and erected a wall of salt, and one still feel their sting. The new show's title, taken from the quasi wanted poster, goes so far as an accusation: Slim . . . you don't got the juice.
Still, he shares with other black artists, like Titus Kaphar, a concern for dignity and a common touch. That is what marks the blurry prints as friends. The show's title still speaks the language of the streets. The questioning should become a self-questioning for the viewer as well. What does it mean for art to cohere, and who gets to decide how to look? It has to take more than a heaping handful of staples and a frame.
Nari Ward ran at the New Museum through May 26, 2019, Wilmer Wilson IV at Susan Inglett through March 16. The review of Ward first appeared in in a slightly different form in Riot Material magazine. Related articles look at Nari Ward in the galleries, in summer sculpture, and in a Whitney Biennial.