Renowned British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner has been chosen to curate the sixteenth edition of the Museum of Modern Art’s Artist’s Choice series of exhibitions. Wales Bonner will select around 50 works from the New York institution’s collection, which will appear in the galleries on the ground floor of the museum from November 18 this year until April 7, 2024.
After extensive research into MoMA’s holdings, Wales Bonner chose the theme “Spirit Movers”, which the designer says is meant to evoke multiple stories, inspire contemplation and evoke new connections between people and places. The exhibition will center black cultural and aesthetic practices inspired by the African diaspora and feature works by artists such as Terry Adkins, Moustapha Dimé, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Man Ray and Betye Saar. Curator Marlene Hess Michelle Kuo and assistant curator Dana Liljegren will co-curate the exhibition. “Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers” will be accompanied by a catalog putting works in dialogue with founding texts by black authors of the past century, including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Robin Coste Lewis, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Jean Toomer, Quincy Troupe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
“Grace Wales Bonner changed the way we look at style, not just as a surface but also as a structure,” Kuo said. “Every detail of his polymathic creations, publications, exhibitions and films is tied to long histories, deep archives and cultural identities across the diasporic world.”
Wales Bonner has achieved fame in the fields of conservation, film and publishing, as well as fashion. Founder and creative director of her eponymous fashion brand, which she says “provides a distinct notion of cultural luxury that infuses European heritage with an Afro-Atlantic spirit”, she was named CFDA International Men’s Designer of the Year in 2021 and in 2015 won the LVMH Young Designer Prize. She held her first institutional exhibition, “A Time for New Dreams”, in 2019 at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Wales Bonner is Senior Researcher at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where she recently initiated the four-year Between Criticism and Hope project, which seeks to organize an alternative archival practice based on the polyrhythm of Afro-Atlantic musical and artistic forms. .
“It is a tremendous honor to engage with the artists and works in MoMA’s collection, and I want to express my heartfelt thanks to the museum for allowing me to create so freely,” said Wales Bonner. “I hope the exhibition and associated publication will resonate with the spirit of the contributing artists and continue to evoke new dreams and new visions.”
The Artist’s Choice series was inaugurated in 1989. Recent entrants include Yto Barrada, Amy Sillman, Peter Fischli and David Hammons.
