The British designer Grace Wales Bonner will curate an exhibition at MoMA in New York.
On view in the Museum’s street-level galleries from November 18, 2023, through April 7, 2024, the 16th installment of MoMA’s celebrated Artist’s Choice series will gather artworks with a particular focus on Black cultural and aesthetic practices inspired by the styles, experiences, forms, and sounds of the African diaspora.
For the occasion, Wales Bonner selected a series of works that embodie the idea of “Spirit Movers”, evoking multiple histories, inspire contemplation, and conjure new connections between people and places. Artists from around the world and across generations, including Terry Adkins, Moustapha Dimé, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, Betye Saar, and David Hammons, will be featured in the exhibition. Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers is organized by Grace Wales Bonner with Michelle Kuo, the Marlene Hess Curator, and Dana Liljegren, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.
“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.”
MoMA will also publish an artist’s book titled Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection. An extraordinary selection of nearly 80 works from the Museum’s collection and archives, this unique volume will draw multisensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion. Photographs, scores, and performance documentation will be juxtaposed with signal texts by Black authors spanning 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.
Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers
November 18, 2023 - April 07, 2024
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
moma.org
Photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Washington, D.C. 1957. Courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.
