"[5] The exhibition is designed as a "room-size installation of baby strollers arranged so that you walk around them on a carpet of fire hoses, in a space lit like a church or mausoleum", according to The New York Times,[5] while Time Out describes the exhibit as "evok[ing] the social cost" of "indifference" to landlord neglect that caused fires in minority neighborhoods and "characteristic of Ward's ongoing examination of race and its relationship to the urban environment.
[21] Kirsten Swenson writes in ARTnews that the strollers in the work "were arranged in the shape of a ship’s hull, in reference to the origin of the hymn, which was written by John Newton, an eighteenth-century British slave trader, after his conversion to Christianity during a storm at sea.
"[23] As told to the Vilcek Foundation, "As a hymn about a slave trader begging for forgiveness and promising to change while caught in a storm at sea, the recording resonated with Nari, and allowed for a more hopeful interpretation of the installation.
[23] In 1996, Ward participated in the artist-run exhibition 3 Legged Race, organised in an abandoned firehouse in Harlem with two friends, the artists Janine Antoni and Marcel Odenbach.
[23][25] His installation Hunger Cradle "filled a floor with complex webs of rope, tubing, wire, and yarn, holding in suspension objects found on-site, including a crib, books, piano keys, and various tools", according to Kirsten Swenson of ARTnews.
"[26] To create Mango Tourist, Ward "collected thousands of leftover electrical components and combined them with materials and themes evocative of other economic development projects", according to George Fishman of the Miami Herald.
[7] Mango Tourist is described by the Carnegie Corporation of New York as a work "in which gigantic snowmen made of yellow foam, discarded electrical parts, and mango seeds conjure the images of America as the magical place that Ward envisioned as a kid growing up in Jamaica,"[1] and by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "his gaggle of eight seared-foam, capacitor-bedecked, mango-seed-studded, 10-foot-tall figures [...], a wry reflection on the shared lives of the Berkshire hills and sunburned Jamaica.
[31] In a 2019 interview with Artspace, Ward describes a visit to the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia that was part of the Underground Railroad, and how the floors included holes in the pattern of the Kongo cosmogram prayer symbol, that were used to allow air into the hidden spaces beneath where escaped slaves would hide; in the interview, Nair said, "I was really intrigued by the fact that these holes represented a history that was preserved yet hidden in plain sight.
"[23] This traveling retrospective exhibition included The Happy Smilers: Duty Free Shopping (1996),[7] after it had been in storage since its original installation, and was described as "a kind of time capsule, its everyday materials preserving obscure narratives of racial politics from the age before social media" by Kirsten Swenson of ARTnews,[23] as well as Mango Tourist, We The People, and Afro Chase.
"[35] In 2019, a traveling installation opened at The New Museum, featuring "Amazing Grace" (1993),[19] "Hunger Cradle" (1996), and "We the People" (2011), as well as smaller works such as "Trophy" (1993), Savior" (1996), "Den" (1999), "Glory" (2004), and "Spellbound" (2015).
[5] A 2020 review by The Denver Post of the retrospective installation while it was at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver states "Ward's work has consistently examined the Black experience in America, specifically through the lens of physicality, of actual lives lived, and in that way it connects inescapably to the BLM moment, which itself is rooted in physicality, namely the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, who died while in the custody of police officers on 25 May.