Renowned London fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner has been chosen to curate the sixteenth iteration of MOMA's Artist's Choice exhibition series. Wales Bonner will select approximately fifty works from the New York institution's collection, which will appear in the museum's street galleries from November 18 of this year to April 7, 2024.
Having extensively researched MoMA holdings, Wales Bonner settled on the theme "Spirit Movers", which the designer said aims to evoke multiple stories, inspire contemplation and conjure up new connections between people and places. The exhibition will focus on black cultural practices and aesthetics inspired by the African diaspora and will feature works by artists such as Terry Adkins, Moustapha Dimé, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Man Ray and Betye Saar."Artist's Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers" will be accompanied by a catalog that will place works in dialogue with seminal texts by black authors of the last century, among them 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 has changed the way we look at style - not just as a surface, but as a structure," said Kuo. "Each detail of his polymathic designs, publications, exhibitions and films is related to long histories, deep archives and cultural identities across the diasporic world."
Wales Bonner has won acclaim in the fields of curating, film and publishing, as well as fashion. Founder and artistic director of her namesake fashion brand, which Bonner said "proposes a distinctive notion of cultural luxury that infuses European heritage with an Afro-Atlantic spirit", was named CFDA International Designer of the Year in 2021 and in 2015 won the LVMH Young Designer Award. She curated her first institutional exhibition, "A Time for New Dreams", in 2019 at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Wales Bonner is a principal investigator at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she recently inaugurated the four-year project Between Critique and Hope, which seeks to organize an alternative archival practice based on the polyrhythmicity of Afro-Atlantic musical and artistic forms.
"It is an immense honor to interact with the artists and works in the MoMA collection, and I want to extend my deepest thanks to the museum for allowing me the space to create with such freedom," said Wales Bonner. "I hope the exhibition and associated publication resonate with the spirit of the artists who contributed and continue to evoke new dreams and new visions."
The Artist's Choice series opened in 1989. Recent entrants include Yto Barrada, Amy Sillman, Peter Fischli and David Hammons.
Source: Artforum