Milan, Fondazione Trussardi hosts a project by Nari Ward made for the city

From Sept. 12 to Oct. 16, 2022,Milan ’ s Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents a new project created especially for the city: it is Gilded Darkness (“The Golden Darkness”) by American artist Nari Ward (St. Andrew, Jamaica, 1963). In the outdoor and indoor spaces of the Centro Balneare Romano, in the Città Studi area, Nari Ward will bring never-before-seen works, created for the occasion, alongside celebrated sculptures, installations and environmental interventions. After presenting Ragnar Kjartansson ’s The Sky in a Room at the church of San Carlo al Lazzaretto in the fall of 2020, and after launching the activities of the Fondazione Beatrice Tr ussardi in 2021 - launching the nomadic model of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi on an international scale - President Beatrice Trussardi and artistic director Massimiliano Gioni have chosen to return to the heart of the city of Milan with a new intervention in dialogue with the urgencies of our time.

Known for his sculptures and installations assembled from salvaged materials since the early 1990s, Nari Ward has contributed to imagining contemporary art and culture as global and polyphonic experiences. Of Jamaican descent, Ward moved with his family to New York City at a young age, and after studying art he settled in Harlem, a predominantly African American neighborhood of Manhattan. Impressed by the proliferation of abandoned objects on the streets, Ward began collecting objects with strong symbolic value. From the manipulation of these materials - strollers, shopping carts, umbrellas, shoelaces and other found objects and urban waste - came monumental installations that transformed the language of contemporary sculpture, introducing theatrical and immersive experiences that have since become a typical aspect of art in this new century.

Opening the project for the Roman Bathing Center will be one of his best-known works, Amazing Grace, produced during his 1993 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem: for this large installation, Ward collected more than 300 abandoned strollers by arranging them in the form of a ship’s hull. The installation is accompanied by the voice of African American gospel singer and activist Mahalia Jackson, who sings the poignant Amazing Grace.

Installed in the rarely accessible spaces of the old locker rooms of the Roman Pool, the work is charged with new meanings: it is an anti-monument reminiscent of recent images of baby carriages left at stations on the border with Ukraine to welcome refugees fleeing the conflict, but it is also a large embrace that envelops viewers in a melancholy and poignant atmosphere.

Alongside Amazing Grace, Nari Ward will present a series of works that focus on many of the themes that animate her research: dialogue between cultures, art as a space of encounter and exchange, the shaping of identity at the border between different languages and traditions, and, in particular, a reflection on the function of monuments at a time marked by the continual revision of history and the numerous collapses and repeated crises that have defined these past few years.

Gilded Darkness will be articulated in the spaces of the Roman Bathing Center, occupying them with physical and intangible traces. The history of the Center-designed by architect Luigi Secchi during Fascism, inaugurated in 1929 and dedicated to the memory of the young Olympic champion Guido Romano who died at the front during World War I-tells of ideals of victory and greatness, of wars and athleticism, of nationalism and imperialism: concepts to which Ward responds with his precarious monuments and objects that embody stories of small everyday heroisms, episodes of collective joy but also images of defeats and falls of the triumphant myths that had spanned the twentieth century.

At the center of the exhibition are a number of new productions, commissioned by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, including Emergence Pool, asite-specific intervention on the swimming pool-a central element of the Centro Balneare, with its rectangular pool of 4,000 square meters, almost as large as a soccer field-which is transformed into a gigantic golden expanse: a fragile raft composed of thousands of floating thermal blankets. Not far away, a huge white flag hoisted on a crane evokes images of nationalism, violence and defeat, while sounds and musical compositions made in collaboration with various groups and individuals who live and inhabit Milan are broadcasting from the loudspeakers of Battleground Beacon: soundscapes that tell of the relationship with the city of people from other countries and cultures.

Nari Ward ’sGilded Darnkess exhibition is part of a series of major exhibition projects carried out since 2003 by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation: public artworks, temporary exhibitions, incursions, performances and pop-up interventions that have brought to Milan celebrated international artists including Pawel Althamer, Allora & Calzadilla, Maurizio Cattelan, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Elmgreen and Dragset, Urs Fischer, Fischli and Weiss, Gelitin, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Ibrahim Mahama, Paul McCarthy, Paola Pivi, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal, and Stan VanDerBeek. Gilded Darkness is conceived and produced by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation and realized with the collaboration of Milanosport. The Foundation thanks Assimpredil Ance Milano for their support. Media Partner: Sky Arte.

Nari Ward

Born in St. Andrew, Jamaica, in 1963, Nari Ward is one of the best-known contemporary artists of his generation. Active since the 1990s, his work has been exhibited at major international festivals-from the Venice Biennale (1993), to the Whitney Museum Biennial in New York (1995), to Documenta XI in Kassel (2002)-and is part of the collections of major museum institutions in the United States and around the world, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, Whitney Museum, Public Library of New York (USA), Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington (USA), ICA in Boston (USA), MoCA in Los Angeles (USA), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (USA), GAM in Turin (Italy), Istanbul Modern in Istanbul (Turkey).

He has also received numerous awards and honors, including the Fellowship Award, The United States Artists (Chicago, 2020); the Vilcek Prize from the Vilcek Foundation (New York, 2017); the Joyce Award from the Joyce Foundation (Chicago, 2015); the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Rome (Rome, 2012); and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1996) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1994). Finally, he has received prestigious commissions from the UN and the World Health Organization.

Image: Nari Ward, We the People (2019), installation view at the New Museum, New York. Photo by Maris Hutchinson - EPW Studio

Milan, Fondazione Trussardi hosts a project by Nari Ward made for the city

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