Museum Collections

Created entirely from shoelaces donated by museum visitors and New York City students, Nari Ward’s We the People interrogates the first three words of the Constitution’s Preamble. At different moments in American history, those three words—"We the People"—have proven unstable in meaning. Ward urges his viewers to consider which people it defends. By scaling this iconic text to a monumental size, the work is simultaneously legible and ambiguous, depending on the viewer’s physical proximity to the piece.