Grace Wales Bonner: material and performance

For Art Basel magazine

Fashion designer 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 Terry Adkins, Moustapha Dimé, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, Betye Saar, and David Hammons, 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.’

Grace Wales Bonner. Photograph by Liz Johnson Artur.