The New Museum’s archival documentation of Nari Ward’s Carpet Angel includes 35mm slides from Ward’s Harlem studio, where the work was originally created, as well as photographs taken when the work was installed in the New Museum’s New Work gallery in 1993, for Ward’s first museum exhibition. The slides from his studio depict the sculpture suspended from the ceiling by two thin, rusty pipes, illuminated from behind by daylight filtering through the windows. The studio floor is dark and shiny, and the halo of the two windows casts heavy shadows onto the space between Carpet Angel and the viewer.

In contrast, the installation photography of Carpet Angel from Ward’s eponymous 1993 exhibition shows the work in a brighter and more expansive architectural site. These photographs demonstrate that the increased ceiling height of the Museum’s gallery allowed for more vertical space between the suspended and floor-bound components of the sculpture, amplifying the sensation of physical and divine ascension. At the same time, the installation photographs inherently are unable to communicate the visible connective resonance between the work and the origin of its materials and creation that are so apparent in the artist’s slides.

35mm slides like that of Carpet Angel populate the New Museum’s Archives as evidence of historical artists’ files. This kind of evidentiary trace was key to the Museum’s founding mission to document and present contemporary works by living artists in a critical and scholarly context.¹ To this end, the Museum established a slide library, particularly focusing on artists who were lesser known and unaffiliated due to lack of exposure. In some cases, artists would mail slides of their work during open calls; in others, Museum curators would directly solicit specific images from artists as they planned upcoming exhibitions.

The slide of Carpet Angel, in particular, provides a hint of the character of Ward’s Harlem studio, but also the experimental and adaptive nature of his creative process. The work itself is dependent upon the existing architecture of the room and the rolled carpets speak directly to the space in which the artist found them.³ As such, this archival image provides a rare glimpse into the intimate relationship between Ward’s immediate environment and the found materials he chooses to work with, a relationship that necessarily—even deliberately—grows more subjective and imaginative as the work moves from studio to museum.