Bradley Robert Ward

Bradley Robert Ward

Through a multitude of media, Ward explores the modalities and poly-characterization of survival within the Black experience. Emphasizing domains in which rhythm has matriculated through the Black body, often in labor, there is also space for the extraordinary in the confluence of Black leisure. Often using sports and performance to reinforce this median within Black life, Ward focuses on the magic of Black harmony and resonance, creating context for both through portraiture and overlapping figuration respectively. Through the dense layering of figures and other culturally iconic imagery, Ward approaches the topic of performance with questions about self, identity, and place.

Ward’s practice is rooted in storytelling and research; all of the figures depicted within the exhibition works are real-life baseball players from different American baseball leagues throughout history that the artist has spent much time studying. In one of the portraits, Ward illustrates professional baseball outfielder Lou Brock, who spent most of his major league career playing for the St. Louis Cardinals. The Missouri state flower is collaged onto the piece to commemorate the player’s recent passing. On another, Ward illustrates the word “Hitsville,” a nickname given to Motown’s first-ever recording studio, across an image of his father’s high school baseball team(Jack Yates high school in Houston, TX). With this, Ward emphasizes the interconnectedness between sports and music within his personal life and Black culture in general. For Ward, sports, music, and art are all vehicles through which he has been able to define himself, and the lives and experiences of these Black performers have played an extraordinary role in his continuous journey to self discovery.

Since his time spent studying at Pratt where he received his MFA in 2019, Ward has become heavily influenced by and enamored with Arthur Jafa’s frankness and accuracy in describing what has felt like personal afflictions, only to learn that these feelings are responses to circumstance. Ward specifically references Jafa’s affinity for assemblage and mixed media work; as the artist and cinematographer explains, Black individuals often fixate on material because they once were considered that: raw material. Focusing on the exhibition’s cyanotypes, there is a discernible essence of reverence. However, the process of creating the body of work not only echoes Jafa’s words, but it also refers to the countless slaves, athletes, and Black ancestors that have been lost throughout time. As Ward describes it, “the act of creating a cyanotype is very much akin to the call and response of old hymns that were sung in the fields—often thought of as an act to boost morale, but truthfully, it was a call and response to see who all was still with them, just as the image is contrasting with the chemical solution and ultimately charged getting as (black and)blue as they want. A surface treated with the same hot sun that they toiled in, so it’s only right that I chose to commemorate them on a fan, not only as an act of a reprieve, but to reflect that congregation.”

In addition to Jafa, Toni Morrison has been a critical influence on Ward’s recent work. Over the past years, Ward has spent much time listening to and reading the writing of the Black female novelist, garnering an immense admiration for her efforts in providing representation for girl sand boys of color like himself. Citing Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” Ward’s work is inspired by the finite moments of escape within this grand white narrative that Morrison often speaks about, where Black people can naturally and fully be themselves, whether it be trading colloquialisms, exchanging laughs, or simply sharing stillness. Ignited by the literature, Ward thinks back to the first time he felt this described sensation of safety, trust, and mutual understanding: “for me it was playing youth baseball and having another black kid on the team. Being in the outfield together, going to the concessions afterwards just feeling a level of freedom I didn’t have unless I was around family, school or church. My social motor skills were so tuned to being a certain version of myself, but that was unlocked when I saw myself in someone else.”

B. Houston, TX ; Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.