Grace Wales Bonner to curate an exhibition at MoMa
The Museum of Modern Art has announced a new exhibition curated by Wales Bonner
Dubbed ‘Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers’ and running November 18, 2023, through April 7, 2024, the exhibition features approximately 50 works from MoMA’s collection.
Wales Bonner has chosen the works that will appear in the exhibition after years of research in MoMA’s archives, selecting artworks from the museum’s wide-ranging collection. In particular, the series gathers artworks with a focus on Black cultural and aesthetic practices inspired by the styles, experiences, forms, and sounds of the African diaspora. It will feature artists including, Terry Adkins, Moustapha Dimé, Agnes Martin, Man
“It is an immense honor to engage with the artists and works collected in the MoMA collection, and I wish to extend my deepest thanks to the museum for allowing me the space to create so freely,” said Wales Bonner, who has been awarded numerous awards, including the LVMH Young Designer Prize (2016) and the CFDA International Men’s Designer of the Year (2021).
“I hope the exhibition and associated publication resound with the spirit of the contributing artists and continue to conjure new dreams and new visions.”
As part of the exhibition, MoMA will equally publish an artist’s book titled ‘Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit’ in the MoMA Collection, assembled by Wales Bonner as “an archive of soulful expression.”
“Grace Wales Bonner has changed the way we see style—not only as surface but as structure,” said exhibition curator, 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.”
Wales Bonner joins other artists who have participated in the Artist’s Choice series, which was inaugurated in 1989, including Yto Barrada (2021), Amy Sillman (2019), Peter Fischli (2018), David Hammons (2017), Trisha Donnelly (2012) and the architects Herzog & de Meuron (2006).
