In sports, fans and pundits often talk about generational talents — players who many times come out of nowhere to completely rewrite the playing field. Think Lionel Messi, Serena Williams, Tom Brady, Nikola Jokić. Fashion, too, possesses these sorts of ‘players’, or rather, designers who bridge what’s come before with something refreshing, something entirely new. While there are a handful of notable inclusions today, Grace Wales Bonner has been a tour de force, from spearheading her sportswear-inspired namesake label to her sought-after adidas collaborations, including recent kit designs for the Jamaica National Football Team.
To follow, the acclaimed English fashion designer has been tapped by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to curate the latest entry in the institution’s Artist’s Choice series. Entitled Spirit Movers and going on view at the museum’s street-level galleries this fall, Bonner will select 50 artworks from MoMA’s collection that focus on Black cultural heritage and the aesthetic practices, experiences and sounds of the African diaspora. Described by Bonner as a platform to conjure new connections between people and places, the show will include works by Terry Adkins, Moustapha Dimé, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, Betye Saar, and David Hammons, amongst many.
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“I hope the exhibition and associated publication resound with the spirit of the contributing artists and continue to conjure new dreams and new visions,” said Bonner in a statement. The aforementioned publication will be a new catalog specially released for the occasion called Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection, which chronicles 80 works from the museum’s archive, juxtaposing multi-sensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion.
“Grace Wales Bonner has changed the way we see style—not only as surface but as structure,” said one of the exhibition’s curators, Michelle Kuo. “Every detail of her polymathic designs, publications, exhibitions, and films is related to long histories, deep archives, and cultural identities across the diasporic world. Like her exhibition, this book is a deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression—and it reflects Wales Bonner’s commitment to archival research as both a form of spirituality and an aesthetic practice.”
Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers will go on view at MoMA New York from November 18, 2023 to April 7, 2024.
Elsewhere, Olaolu Slawn creates for the community.
Museum of Modern Art
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