Focusing on identity and representation, the fashion designer has just opened an exhibition at MoMA

Jeni Fulton

Grace Wales Bonner on bringing together material, sound, and performance

Fashion designer&nbsp;Grace Wales Bonner has just opened the exhibition ‘Spirit Movers’ as part of the ‘Artist’s Choice’ series at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Working with curator Michelle Kuo, she selected around 50 artworks from MoMA’s collection, creating multisensory connections between pictures, sound, performance, hearing, touch, and bodies in motion. She brings together <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8598/Terry-Adkins" target="_blank">Terry Adkins</a>, Moustapha Dimé, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7257/Agnes-Martin" target="_blank">Agnes Martin</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7171/Man-Ray" target="_blank">Man Ray</a>, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/27616/Betye-Saar" target="_blank">Betye Saar</a>, and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7509/David-Hammons" target="_blank">David Hammons</a>, contrasting the delicately drawn grids of Martin’s Friendship (1963) with Adkins’s hybrid sculpture-instruments made of brass and drumskin. The artworks touch on themes of musicality, storytelling, and the intersection of cultural narratives, and are inherently reflective of her practice as a self-described ‘researcher.’ 
‘Spirit Movers’ extends Wales Bonner’s preoccupation with polyphony and the relationships between various avenues of creativity: materials, representation, and music. This spans her curatorial, design, and documentary practice. ‘The basis of what I do is research. I see it is as an artistic and spiritual practice, something that is very natural, and continuous, like music. I'm trying to translate something that is sonic into something visual,’ she notes. ‘And then it can have different outlets.’

‘Last year’s fall-winter collection was about togetherness – I was inspired by the art of Moki Cherry, and her husband, jazz trumpeter Don Cherry’s music, and their lifestyle. They created “organic music” performances; music about raising children, traveling, and bringing all these different cultural collaborations into creating sound.’
‘Spirit Movers’ is not the designer’s first foray into curating: in 2019, she curated the show ‘A Time for New Dreams’ at the Serpentine in London, which looked into resonances within Black cultural and aesthetic practices. Through a multisensory installation and a series of happenings, the Serpentine exhibition invited contemplation and activated the spaces of the gallery through objects, texts, sounds, scents, performances, and still and moving images. Visitors encountered an assemblage of shrines by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7139/Rashid-Johnson" target="_blank">Rashid Johnson</a>, Liz Johnson Artur, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/26119/Kapwani-Kiwanga" target="_blank">Kapwani Kiwanga</a>, Laraaji, <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/46364/Eric-N-Mack" target="_blank">Eric N. Mack</a>, and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/47553/Paul-Mpagi-Sepuya" target="_blank">Paul Mpagi Sepuya</a>.

‘My work is beyond fashion and I want to be able to show that. I am not that interested in it being isolated. It needs to have context. I think of myself an artist really. This way of collaborating has always been a part of me. I just haven’t shown it to the world until now,’ she told i-D magazine at the time of the London exhibition.
Wales Bonner is hyperaware of the power of images and representation. Previous collections have been photographed by Liz Johnson Artur, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Tyler Mitchell: photographers whose renown lies in the implicit self-reflection of their image making.
‘To me, they are people who are leading culture forward. To have an artist like Paul Sepuya, whose work has inspired me, document what I'm doing adds another layer to it. Similarly with Liz Johnson Artur ­– I've been very informed by her photography, and for her to photograph the work means it becomes part of her archive, and therefore historicized material.’

Through her focus of how her collections are represented and documented, Wales Bonner is embedding them firmly within the universe of contemporary Black culture: the clothes are not meant to be read as stand-alone objects. ‘It's really important for me not to present a singular way of looking at the work, so I invite people to see it through their lens, and they'll expand on it. It’s also to understand the historical importance of what I'm trying to say about the work, to institutionalize it.’
Bringing an Afro-Atlantic perspective to European luxury, uncovering hidden narratives, and uniting material perspectives, Wales Bonner’s project pushes against a unified narrative of what fashion could and should be. A case in point: her show for Pitti Uomo at the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence incorporated artist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/30374/Ibrahim-Mahama" target="_blank">Ibrahim Mahama</a>’s repurposed coal sacks, with their implied histories of trade and commodity, as stage setting. The clothes included Savile Row tailoring, silk jacquard opera coats developed by Charvet in Paris, beaded macrame dresses, and hand-dyed jerseys from Burkina Faso. ‘It’s about showing these different specific crafts in relation to each other, bringing everything onto one kind of conversation,’ says Wales Bonner.

While Western designers in the past have often appropriated traditional forms in their designs – a classic case in point here is Maison Martin Margiela’s ‘Tabi’ shoes, which riff on Japanese samurai footwear – Wales Bonner’s project is to showcase the relationships between materials, techniques, and therefore, representation. This was most explicit in her 2022 collaboration with <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8633/Kerry-James-Marshall" target="_blank">Kerry James Marshall</a> on a capsule collection. Here, she noted that ‘the problems Kerry had identified with the Western art historical canon were also abundant in the world of fashion. His artistic achievements opened my eyes to the real power and liberating possibilities of image making. By so elegantly centralizing the Black figure in his work, Kerry showed me just how different things could be, how ideals of beauty can be challenged.’
Wales Bonner talks of being a custodian of ideas and new possibilities, thinking about which aspects of the past are relevant to the future, from overlapping continents and timeframes. This is echoed in her approach to designing, which draws on a subtext of identity and representation. A key early realization was that clothes can serve as a highly effective, immediate method of communication, capable of transmitting complex emotions and concepts. ‘But that’s one outcome. I’m interested in many others.’ And it is precisely this hybridity of expression that can be experienced in ‘Spirit Movers’.

‘Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner – Spirit Movers’ is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, until April 7, 2024.


Dr Jeni Fulton is Art Basel’s Head of Editorial.

Published on November 24, 2023. 
Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1.&nbsp;Anthony Barboza?&nbsp;Reggie Nicholson, Henry Threadgill Sextet, Village Vanguard, New York City,&nbsp;1988. Geraldine J. Murphy Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2023 Anthony Barboza. 2.&nbsp;Michelle Kuo and Grace Wales Bonner in ‘Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers’, on view at The Museum of Modern Art from November 18, 2023 through April 07, 2024. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado. 3.&nbsp;Henri Cartier-Bresson,&nbsp;Washington, D.C,&nbsp;1957. Gift of&nbsp;John C. Waddell. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2023 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.

title_style_2

With memories of a long war fading, they are finding new things to say and novel ways to show their work

Stories

A new generation of Colombian artists embraces ecology, diversity, and heritage

Antônio Henrique Amaral’s Battlefield 2 opens another chapter for the tropical fruit at Art Basel Miami Beach

Banana politics

Amid Egypt’s revolution and Cairo’s evolution, the artist and gallerist’s collaborative friendship has remained steadfast for over 20 years

Gypsum Gallery’s Aleya Hamza and artist Basim Magdy on their enduring synergy

Focusing on identity and representation, the fashion designer has just opened an exhibition at MoMA

Welcome,

DISCOVER MORE RELATED CONTENT BELOW: