A Spirit Movers Reading List

These texts by artists, writers, and scholars were crucial to the interdisciplinary designer Grace Wales Bonner as she curated her Artist’s Choice exhibition Spirit Movers and accompanying book, Dream in the Rhythm. Along with the accompanying playlist, this list serves as a resource and a touchstone for the more than 50 artworks that explore sound, movement, performance, and style in the African diaspora and beyond.

Horace D. Ballard, “Fear and Trembling: Of Visionary Art and the Search for the Spirit” in When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (New York: Studio Museum of Harlem, 2014)

“I am corporeal and made of the same elements as stars.” —Horace D. Ballard

Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2021)

Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances (New York: Phaidon Press, 2012)

David Hammons, “Reflections of a Long Distance Runner” in Yardbird Suite, Hammons 93 (Williamstown, Mass: Williams College Museum of Art, 1994)

George Lewis, “The Sound of Terry Adkins” in Terry Adkins: Recital (New York: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and DelMonico Books, 2018)

Ben Okri, “The Poet Declares” in An African Elegy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992)

“I connect the embers of an / ancient dream— / Let the music irradiate my spirit / And I shall travel farther than allowed / to find the gifts of the new / light.” —Ben Okri

Greg Tate, “Hoodoo is what we do” in NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith (Houston, Texas: The Menil Collection, 2008)

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, The River Between (London: Heinemann African Writers Series, 1965)

Jean Toomer, “Blue Meridian” in The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1980)