The London-based clothing designer is making an indelible mark in fashion with majestic renditions of the diaspora’s history. Now, she celebrates its intricate roots in an unveiling of the ‘Spirit Movers’ exhibition.
Underneath every Grace Wales Bonner fashion collection are innate, influential layers of Black culture. Her exquisitely detailed, sharply-tailored garments tell meaningful stories about Black identity and history, inspired by Black artists, intellectuals and events such as jazz musician Don Cherry, writer James Baldwin, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, and settings of early 20th-century Harlem ballrooms.
Established in 2015, her brand embodies a discerning blend of cultural immersion, tradition and formal clothing design training so coherent it’s irresistible to a fashion industry grappling to see a clear path forward. She consistently connects with consumers’ conscious thoughts and ideas because she is unafraid to use her designs to invoke invigorating conversations about race.
Wales Bonner’s inherent, Afro-Atlantic approach to fashion design is solidifying her as a central figure in the industry. And lately, her footing in the art world is proving to be just as intuitive.
In “An Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner – Spirit Movers”, a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the designer utilizes the same natural perspectives to curate a selection of more than 50 works from the museum’s permanent collection. She is the first fashion designer asked to take part in the series since its launch in 1988, but her deep commitment to her research of Black history, as demonstrated in her clothing designs, makes her a worthy choice. Although there is no clothing in the exhibit, it carries Wales Bonner’s distinctive archival imprint and represents her passion for music and how it can be rendered into different sensorial forms. In an interview with Vogue, she explains the sentiment: “It’s a subject I keep coming back to, of how music and sound can be translated into something else.”
The heart of the exhibit is the Last Trumpet, four epic brass horns by American artist Terry Adkins. “Adkins is an artist I really admire.” (Other works by Adkins are also featured in the exhibition). “He said he made these at the scale as if angels could play them – so the works are both a sculpture [and something that] could be used in a performance. So I was also interested in that kind of crossing over or intersection, when an artwork moves into other forms.”
Among the exhibit’s awe-inspiring works is Lady With a Long Neck by Senegalese sculptor Moustapha Dimé, an elegantly undulated sculpture of salvaged iron and the trunk of a tree – despite the massive weight of the materials, it actually bears a graceful, airy lightness. Like the show’s many other pieces, this is the first time it’s on view at the museum.
Also on display are books that have gone through transformations, including one stained with mud and water and a piece by David Hammons made of human hair collected from a barbershop and woven into a paper scroll named Afro Asian Eclipse (or Black China), another hallmark of the exhibition.
The show continues past the gallery space, one of the few at MoMA that are free to the public. It includes a shared playlist through Spotify and an exhibition catalog titled Dream in the Rhythm, which is a compilation of Wales Bronner’s observations about the theme of sound through other channels. “It’s been a really special project that’s almost describing this theme through photography and poetry,” she said. “I was interested in treating the different art forms quite respectfully and giving them their own space to exist in different ways.” The book also spotlights the poetry of June Jordan and Nikki Giovanni, along with photographs by Dawoud Bey, Ming Smith, Glenn Ligon and others.
“I hope the space can be a sanctuary for people, and I hope that they can start to feel some of the rhythms and to be present and have a direct interaction with the works”, she sums up. “But I also wanted to leave space for imagination, really, between the world, for them to have presence in their own life.”
