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“She sees research as a spiritual and artistic endeavor, one that informs her polymathic practice, which extends to publications, performance, writing, film, and beyond,” Michelle Kuo, a chief curator at large at MoMA who worked with Wales Bonner on the exhibition, told ARTnews.

For the exhibition, on view until April 7, Wales Bonner has taken over part of MoMA’s first-floor galleries, showcasing a collection of 50 artworks with a focus on Black aesthetic and cultural practices inspired by the sounds, styles, and experiences of the African diaspora.

Each of the displays epitomizes the title of the show which Wales Bonner has said “evoke multiple histories, inspire contemplation, and conjure new connections between people and Places.” Works featured in the show come from an array of artists, including Terry Adkins, Betye Saar, Moustapha Dimé, David Hammons, and even the likes of Agnes Martin and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

A recurring theme in the exhibition is a certain musicality, best exemplified by Adkin’s large-scale installation Last Trumpet (1995). Its four eye-catching, elegantly shaped trumpets stand tall at the far side of the first gallery and immediately draw you toward them. These 18-foot-long horns are functional musical instruments, part of Adkin’s aim to connect the worlds of music, sculpture, and performance, like Wales Bonner’s intention in bridging fashion with other creative disciplines.

Literature is just one point of reference for Wales Bonner. Creating worlds for characters to inhabit through different fabric textures, sounds, rhythm, and movement. She has said that fashion is an immediate form of communication to an audience where she can explore deep ideas. Wales Bonner’s practice is also informed by her extensive archival research, which lends each project a holistic approach that aims to create worlds for posterity. One such work is a hard-to-miss wooden carving by Moustapha Dimé titled Lady with a Long Neck (1992) that combines found materials (both organic and industrial) collected from the streets of Dakar. In its raw form, the sculpture bridges Islamic and Sufi spirituality with artistic handiwork.

On view for the first time is David Hammons’s makeshift scroll Afro Asian Eclipse (or Black China), from 1978, which is a reference to Duke Ellington’s 1971 album The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse. In using the form of an East Asian scroll that has at its center a cluster of hair collected from barbershop floors, the work highlights the connection between Afro-Pacific and Afro-Atlantic culture.

“Many works in the show make use of found materials—things that have a history, that have had other lives,” Kuo said. “Moustapha Dimé’s Lady with a Long Neck features a reclaimed butcher’s block at its center, with a rhythmic array of notches that are actually the marks made by cooks who had used the wooden block in Dakar.”

She continued, “There’s a beautiful rhythm, too, in the carefully patterned tufts of hair woven into David Hammons’s Afro-Asian Eclipse, which the artist collected from the floors of barber shops. You can see the trace of hands, of meditative motions, of a different kind of musicality in each piece.”

But, Wales Bonner sees curating art exhibitions as an extension of her work as a fashion designer. Her first exhibition “A Time for New Dreams,” which borrowed its title from a collection by Nigerian British poet Ben Okri, was staged at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2019. Its themes focused on mysticism, magical realism, and ritual within Black cultural and aesthetic practices and looked at the ideas of shrines across the Black Atlantic.

Showcasing sculpture, film, photography, literature, music, poetry, performances, and more, the multisensory installation show brought together a group of artists including Rashid Johnson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Eric N. Mack, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Liz Johnson Artur, who has since become a frequent collaborator. In the show’s catalogue, Okri says of Wales Bonner’s research-focused practice, “We ought to use time like emperors of the mind. Do magic things that the future surprised will find.”

Claude Adjil, the exhibition’s curator, said that in early conversations with Wales Bonner, she mentioned Robert Farris Thompson’s landmark 1983 book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy, which looks at five African civilizations (Kongo, Yoruba, Mande, Cross River, and Ejagham) and how they have impacted the social, aesthetic and metaphysical traditions and creative output of Black people across the African diaspora. “We were looking at different books but also artists that have inspired her,” Adjil said.

But beyond just presenting a static exhibition with works on view, Wales Bonner thought about how to create a show that could be activated and could come alive through a performance program, including an evening with British musician and songwriter Sampha, whom Wales Bonner has previously collaborated with for a zine Shy Light (2017) and the soundtrack to her Autumn/Winter 2017 show. “Grace holds space for these different collaborations,” Adjil said.

Recurring themes in her practice, both as a designer and as a curator,  are the intergenerational artistic production of Black people across the diaspora. Just as Okri’s poetry collection lent its title to her Serpentine show, Ishmael Reed’s 1972 seminal book Mumbo Jumbo gave her Autumn/Winter 2019 collection its title,  and her research for one project often leads to the next, as Okri led her to Reed. Set in 1920s New York, Mumbo Jumbo follows a series of narratives surrounding jazz music, white supremacy, and voodoo in a collage-style approach. In a statement accompanying the collection, Wales Bonner said, “The collection considers the role of writers as oracles, connecting to a rich and magical lineage, serving as the custodians of ancestral wisdom passed down and reinterpreted.”

For each of Wales Bonner’s boundary-pushing projects, there is a different themebut, according to Adjil, “they’re building blocks in what she has been looking at across over the years.” Such was the case with Johnson Artur, whom Wales Bonner met during a studio visit during the research phase of “A Time for New Dreams.” “We went to her studio and there was a lot of rich and ongoing dialogue, talking about what had inspired her and what she was thinking about for her design collection,” Adjil recalled.

Johnson Artur added, “I have been working on my ongoing art project Black Balloon Archive for the last 30 years and have never compromised on my idea to create a space where the people I photograph can see themselves through their own self. I like to believe this was the reason Grace approached me for the first time for her curated show at the Serpentine.”

Those conversations ultimately laid the groundwork for what would become Wales Bonner’s “Mumbo Jumbo” collection, which featured an assortment of characters, ranging from a West African spiritual healer to an artist shaman. Also included in the cast were intellectuals from Howard University, who dressed in the classic American college wardrobe consisting of wide leg jeans and trousers, oxford and polo shirts, and jazz-era tuxedos.

“I’ve been thinking about black intellectualism as a form of spirituality,” Wales Bonner told AnOther Magazine in an interview at the time. “It’s referencing very recognisable clothing – American college – but trying to imbue that with a sense of magic that originates from African spirituality; imbuing something that’s very classic and American and with a sense of language and culture that comes from somewhere else.”

Wales Bonner and Johnson Artur would collaborate again for the designer’s Autumn/Winter 2020 collection Lovers Rock, which Johnson Artur photographed. The collection was a celebration of the reggae genre of the same name that emerged from the British Afro-Caribbean underground parties of the 1970s. Serving as a love letter to Caribbean music and fashion, the partnering with Johnson Artur was symbiotic, as she has documented the African diaspora for over three decades from underground clubbing scenes to street life, from church celebrations to everyday moments.

 “Art has no boundaries—I believe Grace shares this vision too,” Johnson Artur said. “Collaborating is an essential part of my practice and each one has been a highlight in my career.”

Alongside the MoMA exhibition, there is also a mixtape on Spotify where Wales Bonner takes us on a journey of soundscapes through the exhibition, and an artist’s book, titled Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit, created and edited by her as a “an archive of soulful expression,” featuring photographs, texts, poems, and more by authors and artists including Reed, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Langston Hughes, and Quincy Troupe.

“Grace Wales Bonner has changed the way we see style—not only as surface but as

structure,” Kuo said. “Every detail of her polymathic designs, publications, exhibitions, and films is related to long histories, deep archives, and cultural identities across the diasporic world.”

At the forefront of contemporary African art from the continent and the diaspora, the expansive fair champions diverse perspectives and experiences, collaborating with leading and up-and-coming galleries from around the world. Below, a look at the best on view at 1-54, which runs until October 15.

Below is a list of 10 best offerings, from exciting up-and-coming artists to established ones, at Frieze London, which runs until October 15.

It’s anything but basic, and its necessity is currently the subject of a new exhibition, simply titled “Milk,” at the Wellcome Collection in London, through September 10, that takes on the subject with close attention to milk’s societal impact on global politics, economics, and culture. The show looks at milk’s deep-rooted past to humanity, our present relationship with the superfood, and our changing perceptions of it and how that might impact milk’s future.

Curated by Marianne Templeton and Honor Beddard, “Milk” features over 100 works ranging from objects used in infant feeding and farming to advertisements and public health posters, as well as works of contemporary art and new artist commissions.

One of the first works you see is a giant, black cow udder, stretched and sagging from carrying milk. Made of metal, coal dust, textile, and paint, Julia Bornefeld’s 1995 untitled hanging sculpture draws out how a maternal body, both human and animal, as both a site of extraction and care, a recurring theme across the exhibition.

But first some history. Dairy products, and methods of their preservation, date back centuries, with that ancient history represented here by a Roman terracotta model of a mule carrying two trays loaded with cheeses, dating to the 3rd or 2nd century BCE. Milk consumption largely spread because of European colonialization, which imposed the drink as a cultural standard; European dairy cattle breeds, like the Holstein-Friesian, are still the most common globally. Though, according to wall text explaining the “Story of Milk,” around two-thirds of the world’s population has difficulty digesting milk, especially into adulthood.

In an eight-minute animated video titled White (2022), Danielle Dean highlights the role of milk as a tool for colonial narratives. She explores the impact of dairy cattle in the area around Mount Taranaki in New Zealand, a place deforested by British colonial settlers in the 19th century to create grazing pastures. The video shows the forest covered in white matter contaminating it. Nature’s destruction gives way to green fields dotted with cows. The animation runs on a loop, going back to the forest showing an imagining of what it could look like if it were rewilded.

“The animation imagines what the forest would have been like before it was cleared,” Templeton said in an interview. “The artist worked with the Ngāruahine Iwi, who are one of eight Iwi (Māori tribes) in the Taranaki region, to research the plants and animals, and has reconstructed an imagined version of the landscape through a layering of intricately detailed watercolor drawings.”

The show’s primary focus, however, is on the modern milk system, looking at how it became a central part of people’s diets. Milk consumption became popularized in Britain with the rise of coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, which expanded during the Industrial Revolution. As the urban population grew, so did the demand for milk. A two-minute video titled “The Daily Round: The Story of Milk Production and Distribution” shows the Express Dairy company pasteurizing milk with advanced equipment in their factory before being transported on milk trains. Large dairy corporations took control of production as dairy products became centralized. (Today, dairy farms rely on labor from migrant workers, which has decreased since Brexit and has been further exacerbated by Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine.)

In the US, beginning in the early 20th century, milk’s popularity was aided by powerful marketing campaigns that at times weren’t what they seemed. Advertisers created campaigns promoting the white nuclear family as the face of milk; the underlying emphasis on “purity” was not subtle. It also gave eugenicists like Herbert Hoover (later the 31st US President) the tool to argue his racist pseudo-theory of associating the purity of “natural” milk with ideologies of whiteness and racial hierarchy. A 1920s advertisement included in the show quotes Hoover saying, “The white race cannot survive without dairy products.”

Nearby, Luke Turner’s 2017 three-minute video parallels Hoover’s racist ideals. Turner invited the public to respond to the words “He Will Not Divide Us” in a live stream beginning on January 20, 2017, the day Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. The footage shows American Neo-Nazis drinking milk as they chant racist and antisemitic slogans.

Milk being used for political agendas is not a thing of the past, as seen in a limited-edition hat advertising “Government Cheese,” a processed cheese given to American welfare recipients, a disproportionate number of which are Black and Latinx households who have a higher risk of health conditions linked to the consumption of saturated fats, found in Government Cheese. The cheese became a symbol in pop culture with musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z mentioning it in their music as a reference to the poverty they had experienced.

Similarly, advertising campaigns, like the “Got Milk?” campaign in the US and the British version “Make Mine Milk” likewise entered the cultural milieu with a host of celebrities promoting the health benefits of including milk in one’s diet.

A section titled “Scientific Motherhood” highlights how, for example, a crocheted portable weighing scale used by a Health Visitor in the 1930s to weigh babies during home visits became an anxiety-inducing object for many mothers, especially if the baby was underweight. Poor women often lacked the right nutrition and unable to provide enough breastmilk needed for the baby’s growth. (Baby formula milk, first introduced in the 1860s, is a powdered substance consisting of cow milk that was advertised as a “perfect substitute” for breast milk by companies like Glaxo.) These standards in weight and nutrition, developed around white women’s bodies, still persist today and continue to overlook how class, race, and social mobility impact a child’s development.

Other artworks in the exhibition include a captivating 14-minute video projection, with bespoke seating and wallpaper, by Ilana Harris-Babou that was commissioned by the Wellcome Collection. Titled Let Down Reflex (2023), the video includes personal testimonies on breastfeeding by the artist’s mother, sister, and niece, reflecting on the wider political context that surrounds infant feeding. The work also references the lullaby “All the pretty horses,” which is said to have been sung by an enslaved African mother who had been separated from her baby to wet nurse and care for her enslaver’s child. Harris-Babou’s work highlights the horrific and traumatic history of the transatlantic slave trade in which enslaved women were robbed of their bodily autonomy, while also linking it to the present-day inequalities in Black maternal healthcare in the US and UK.

The final part of the show, titled “The Cost of Milk,” encourages viewers to consider the values that underpin our food systems and the choices we make as consumers. Works from Eve Bull with her zine DIY Oat Milk, instructing people how to make oat milk at home, looks at the environmental impact of lifestyle choices and the challenges of ethical consumption in a capitalist system. Commercially produced plant-based milk is sold at a higher price compared to cow milk—environmentalism then risks becoming a concern only the wealthy can afford to care about.

The exhibition’s final work, Jess Dobkin’s commissioned installation For What It’s Worth (2023), examines the ethics, regulation, and complex systems in which human milk and those who produce it are both valued and devalued. She also highlights the rise of human breast milk sales online consumed by bodybuilders, fetishists, and alternative health enthusiasts in the 21st century. The soundtrack played in the room includes excerpts from conversations Dobkin had with her research collaborators during the making of the project.

“I keep coming back to a comment made by [collaborator] Charity Mwebaze,” Beddard said, “that throughout history, a woman is either an animal because of the milk that she produces, or she’s divine also because of the milk that she produces.”