Renowned London-based fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner has been tapped to curate the sixteenth iteration of the Museum of Modern Art’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-level galleries from November 18 of this year through April 7, 2024.
Having extensively researched MoMA’s holdings, Wales Bonner has settled upon the theme “Spirit Movers,” which the designer has said is meant to evoke multiple histories, inspire contemplation, and conjure new connections between people and places. The exhibition will center Black cultural and aesthetic practices inspired by the African diaspora and will feature works by artists including Terry Adkins, Moustapha Dimé, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, and Betye Saar. Marlene Hess Curator Michelle Kuo and curatorial assistant Dana Liljegren will co-organize the show. “Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers” will be accompanied by a catalogue placing works in conversation with seminal texts by Black authors of the past 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 see style—not only as surface but as structure,” said 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.”
Wales Bonner has gained acclaim in the fields of curation, filmmaking, and publishing, as well as fashion. The founder and artistic director of her eponymous fashion label, which she has said “proposes 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 curated her first institutional exhibition, “A Time for New Dreams,” in 2019 at London’s the Serpentine Gallery. Wales Bonner is lead researcher 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 poly-rhythmicality of Afro-Atlantic musical and artistic forms.
“It is an immense honor to engage with the artists and works in MoMA’s collection, and I wish to extend my deepest thanks to the museum for allowing me the space to create so freely,” said Wales Bonner. “I hope the exhibition and associated publication resound with the spirit of the contributing artists and continue to conjure new dreams and new visions.”
The Artist’s Choice series was inaugurated in 1989. Recent participants include Yto Barrada, Amy Sillman, Peter Fischli, and David Hammons.