Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm: Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection

(Hardback)

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Shortlisted for Aperture's 2024 PhotoBook Awards

An artist's book by Grace Wales Bonner, featuring works in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm-Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection is an artist's book assembled by the acclaimed London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner as "an archive of soulful expression." Through an extraordinary selection of nearly 80 works from The Museum of Modern Art's collection and archives, this unique volume draws multisensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion. Photographs, scores, and performance documentation by artists like Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Lorna Simpson, and Ming Smith, among others, are 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. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Artist's Choice: Grace Wales Bonner-Spirit Movers, this resplendent publication is a deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression that echoes Wales Bonner's own vibrant, virtuosic designs.

Reviews

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.--Enuma Okoro "Financial Times: How To Spend It"
Rich with archival imagery from Lee Friedlander's portraits of jazz musician Miles Davis to street scenes in 1970s South Africa captured by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe.--Ins Cross "Financial Times: How To Spend It"
Together, the exhibition and the book are the product of a sensibility that's both sophisticated and intuitive, making connections across periods, mediums, and styles which are so unexpected that every object seems new.--Vince Aletti "New Yorker"
Louis Draper, Roy De Carava, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Dawoud Bey, Ming Smith, Beauford Smith - all look especially fine here, often with images that fix on the endlessly expressive common ground of music and style. Even if the soundtrack is only implied, you can't get it out of your head.--Vince Aletti "Photograph"
Designers contain multitudes. The clothing and accessories one sees on the runway are often steeped in layers upon layers of inspiration and points of reference in history. This holds true for Grace Wales Bonner.--Zachary Weiss "Vogue"
What a fantastic work of poetic research.--Holland Cotter "The New York Times: Arts"
Less of a straightforward exhibition catalog and more of a compendium in which Wales Bonner is able to continue her explorations on the theme of sound through other mediums.--Laia Garcia "Vogue"

Author Bio

Grace Wales Bonner (born 1990) is the founder and artistic director of Wales Bonner. While she sees herself primarily as a researcher, her expansive artistic practice extends to curation, filmmaking, and publishing. In 2019 she curated her first institutional exhibition, A Time for New Dreams, at the Serpentine Gallery, London. She has recently launched a four-year project, Between Critique and Hope, at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she is lead researcher. The project attempts to use the poly-rhythmicality of Afro-Atlantic musical and artistic forms as the organizing principle for an alternative archival practice. For her work at Wales Bonner, she has received numerous awards, including the LVMH Young Designer Prize (2016) and the CFDA International Men's Designer of the Year (2021). She has also collaborated with brands including adidas Originals, Anderson & Sheppard, and Dior.
https://walesbonner.net/pages/about

Michelle Kuo is The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.