British-Jamaican designer Grace Wales Bonner believes that research itself is an artistic practice. It can, she says, “have value for its own sake. It doesn’t [always] need to do something else as well.” But having spent four years selecting some 50 works by 24 artists from across cultures and time periods, this time there is a show at the end.
We are talking in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where Wales Bonner — this year’s curator for MoMA’s Artist’s Choice — has just opened her exhibition Spirit Movers. The series began in 1989 as an invitation to contemporary artists and creators to select and respond to works of art in the museum’s collection. Wales Bonner may be best known for her successful fashion design brand, but the MoMA exhibition is part of her expanding vision — this is her second curatorial role, following one at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2019.
Wales Bonner, 33, is increasingly recognised for building a creative oeuvre that parlays her foundational interests of Afro-Atlantic history, aesthetics and poetics into multiple ways of seeing and thinking about the relationships between materiality, form and translation, beauty and spirituality, and tradition and invention. “It wasn’t about choosing things I like just visually,” she says of her curation for Spirit Movers. “The theme — sound and spirit movement — is timeless, and being exposed to such an expansive collection it was important to have this lens, a way of seeing to help me create something that feels cohesive.”
In the show, she explores an ongoing fascination with how sound can translate through different materials. Walking into the exhibition, viewers are immediately struck by the American artist Terry Adkins’ larger-than-life 1995 brass sculpture “Last Trumpet”. The four imposing 18-foot trombones, made by connecting the bells of sousaphones and trombones on to elongated brass beams, are installed on an elevated platform against the wall. Adkins reportedly said he scaled the instruments to the size “at which I thought angels would play them.”
There is certainly something awe-inspiring and divine about their presence. They each stand on the mouth of the bell with the long shape extending upwards from the conical head tapering high towards the seeming heavens. You can almost hear the trombones blending into this fuller element of sound that seems to follow you ghostlike through the exhibition.
Showcasing works from artists such as Adkins, David Hammons, Park Seo-Bo, Yasunao Tone, Moustapha Dimé and Jean Dubuffet, the exhibition is grounded in the proliferation of metals such as brass, copper, iron and bronze, natural materials such as wood, series of works on paper, and a diverse range of book sculptures. Wales Bonner says her aim was “to create moments of quiet, moments of loudness, crescendo and up-and-down undulation. That kind of movement was important.”
There is no actual music, but the presence of the metals and sculptural instruments, as well as the select photography, give a sense of reverberation. “Sonically there’s this idea of raising vibration,” she says, “and some spiralling sound [which] guides you upwards.”
She has managed to curate a show that communicates a play between the visual and sonic. One has to tear one’s gaze away from the large-scale sculptural works — not just “Last Trumpet” but the elegant wood and iron “Lady with a Long Neck” by Senegalese artist Moustapha Dimé, or the powerful beauty of Jean (Hans) Arp’s 1935 cast stone “Human Concretion” — to see the details and sense the power of smaller pieces, such as the 2003 Edgar Arceneaux work “Failed Attempt at Crystallization III”.
This is the only work on loan, not part of the MoMA collection. A copy of Roots by Alex Haley, which tells the story of enslaved Africans, stands upside down on a mirror in a glass box. The bottom of the book has been encrusted with sugar crystals and it appears, through the use of reflection, as if it is being eaten by the sweet substance from both ends. Wales Bonner was drawn to the work, she explains, because “I see some kind of magical potential in the materials as well, and I like the possibility of some kind of spiritual potential. The way this was made, Arceneaux couldn’t have predicted how much it would crystallise. Something could happen. Some element of chance.”
This sense of happenstance and connection lends itself to how we see works within the show. In photographs such as the German-born American Ruth Bernhard’s small black-and-white print “Hall Johnson Conducting His Negro Choir”, a pair of brown hands against a black background are held slightly apart, fingers shaped into a gesture that seems to call music upward. The curvaceous gesture could poetically translate into any number of things beyond a conducting movement.
Photography held a special place in Wales Bonner’s growing sense of self. Raised in London to a British mother and a Jamaican father, she feels “like a product of multicultural Britain”. Visiting her paternal homeland of Jamaica as a child, or as a teenager reading the works of Aimé Césaire, she was drawn to a widening appreciation of Caribbean culture. Working to discover her dual heritage and where her family was from, eager to connect imaginatively to her ancestry but also to a wider diasporic community, she says: “I realised I was using photography to find people and landscapes that were familiar to me or [would have been] to my ancestors. It’s something that has been unconsciously guiding me.
“I see what I do in relation to an archive or a history that is rich and has so many amazing artists and writers”, she says of her overall ethos. “There is so much there that I want to be in dialogue with.”
Her discoveries through images and texts have helped her make sense of place, belonging and a multicultural heritage, while the openness and freedom she finds in literature makes a good balance to her equal need for tradition and structure.
“I need both things in my work, something that feels like a frame, classical. Then I like to disrupt . . . It’s not about being an outsider and trying to get into something. It’s actually about feeling a part of something but wanting to disrupt it subtly or blending different forms of art.”
‘Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner — Spirit Movers’ to April 7, moma.org
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