A brush with... Nari Ward

Explicit content warning

04/12/22 • 54 min

2 Listeners

Nari Ward talks to Ben Luke about his influences—including literature, music and, of course, art—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Ward often uses found materials, from baby strollers to baseball bats and shoelaces, and repurposes them in sculptures, wall-based text works and installations. They address present and historical social and political issues, including race and poverty, and deal directly with emotions like loss and hope. Ward was born in 1963 in St Andrew, Jamaica, and moved with his family to the US when he was 12. He now lives and works in New York, and specifically Harlem, which has been much more than the location of his home and studio—often providing the raw materials and the thematic basis of his art. The late curator Okwui Enwezor said of Ward that he had “completely transformed the scale and the ambition of installation art”. He discusses his early interest in the Brothers Hildebrandt, his direct references to Piero Manzoni and Joseph Beuys and his use of Claude McKay’s poetry and The Staple Singers’ lyrics. Plus, he answers the questions we ask all our guests, including the ultimate: what is art for?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

A brush with... Cornelia Parker

Cornelia Parker talks to Ben Luke about her influences, including artists, writers, film-makers, composers and musicians, and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work.

Parker, born in 1956 in Crewe, Cheshire, north-west England, makes works ranging from dramatic room-filling installations to subtle, ephemeral objects— some of the most profound, witty and thought-provoking art of recent decades. Common to her work are acts of transformation, from the violent to the surreal and the whimsical. She takes found objects and substances and through hugely varied processes lends them new, often multilayered, meanings. She discusses her early love of J.M.W. Turner, and the work she eventually made linking Turner with Mark Rothko. She recalls wrapping Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss with a mile of string, in a reference to Marcel Duchamp, and the controversy this intervention prompted in the press. She talks about the increasing concern with politics in her work, including two new works made for her Tate Britain retrospective opening in May 2022. And she answers the questions we ask all our guests, including those about the museum she visits the most, her daily studio rituals, and, ultimately, what art is for.

Cornelia Parker, Tate Britain, London, 19 May-16 October

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

A brush with… Stan Douglas

Ben Luke talks to Stan Douglas about his influences—including writers, film-makers, musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Douglas is a video artist and photographer—one of the leading pioneers of video installation and large-scale photography. He scrutinises these different media and explores how they shape our understanding of reality, through often unexpected connections between contemporary and historical events, and rich references to music and literature. Douglas discusses his early interest in Marcel Duchamp, the enduring power of artists as diverse as Francisco de Goya and Agnes Martin, his endless fascination with Samuel Beckett, and how his love of Miles Davis’s underrated album On the Corner prompted one of his best works, Luanda-Kinshasa (2013).

Stan Douglas’s project for the 59th Venice Biennale, 2011 ≠ 1848, is in the Canadian Pavilion in the Giardini and the Magazzini del Sale, Venice, until 27 November.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.