In May 2019, author Ishion Hutchinson hosted a special gallery talk on the exhibition “Nari Ward: We the People” at the New Museum as part of its Outside the Box gallery talks.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. Hutchinson has been the author of two poetry collections: Far District (2010) and House of Lords and Commons (2016), the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

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.