In March 2019, art historian Abbe Schriber hosted a special gallery talk on the exhibition “Nari Ward: We the People” at the New Museum as part of its Outside the Box series.

Abbe Schriber is an art historian and PhD candidate at Columbia University, where her research focuses on African-American art and art of the African diaspora, particularly of the 1970s and 1980s. Schriber’s writing has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, Art in America, and the Brooklyn Rail, and in catalogues for the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Outside the Box offers gallery-based talks given by a variety of guest speakers over the course of a season. For this season, lecturers with diverse backgrounds and affinities address the New Museum’s exhibition “Nari Ward: We the People” in forty-five- to sixty-minute presentations taking place in the Museum’s galleries. Emphasizing the Museum’s strong commitment to new art and new ideas, Outside the Box gallery talks are open to the public and are intended to provide participants with multidisciplinary perspectives on New Museum exhibitions. Lecturers spoke about the exhibition or themes emergent in Ward’s works from their various positionalities— academic, artistic, personal, political, or otherwise. With their distinct individual relationships to the artist and works on view, lecturers engaged in rich investigations that will illuminate and probe the “Nari Ward: We the People” exhibition.