Swing

Copied Nari Ward, Swing, 2010, shoe tips, car tire, shoe tongues, rope, 32.0 × 32.0 × 16.0 in. (81.3 × 81.3 × 40.6 cm); rope length variable, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Fund, 2018, 2018.14, © 2010, Nari Ward

Artwork Details

Title
Swing
Artist
Date
2010
Location
Dimensions
32.0 × 32.0 × 16.0 in. (81.3 × 81.3 × 40.6 cm); rope length variable
Copyright
© 2010, Nari Ward
Credit Line
Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Fund, 2018
Mediums Description
shoe tips, car tire, shoe tongues, rope
Classifications
Highlights
Object Number
2018.14
Linked Open Data
https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/2018.14

Artwork Description

"It's this lynched tire that's hanging there, but then it's also . . . a tire swing that kids would play on."  --Nari Ward
 
Nari Ward constructed Swing out of found objects--a car tire, rope, and parts of shoes.
At first glance, a tire swing might suggest children at play. But this one hangs from a rope noose, an unmistakable reference to the brutal history of lynching in the United States. 
 
The jumble of different shoes represents the countless lives lost to racial violence, in the past and in our present day. They also suggest the power of many individuals joining forces in a protest march to express collective resistance.

Label text from The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture November 8, 2024 -- September 14, 2025

Gallery Label
Jamaican-born artist Nari Ward has long salvaged materials from the streets near his studio in Harlem, New York, to create art that confronts political and societal issues. Ward notes that found materials "already have history...the discarded [holds] a sense of hopefulness as well as vulnerability." The materials in Swing, a car tire riveted with the tips and tongues of shoes, suggest motor and foot travel, as well as the lives and labors of common people. This artwork powerfully oscillates between extremes, bringing to mind a child's tire swing in a makeshift playground, as well as a fatal violence introduced by its hangman's noose and echoed in its title, which summons the melancholy spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."