Every few years the Museum of Modern Art asks an artist to sift through its vast holdings and assemble a chamber-music-scale exhibition. Past guest curators have included Ellsworth Kelly, Elizabeth Murray and Amy Sillman. This year the invitation went to the London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner and what a fantastic work of poetic research she’s orchestrated in the show she calls “Spirit Movers.”The idea of sound embodied in material is her foundational theme. In 36 objects she covers a wide modern-contemporary cultural field, which includes figures well-known and overlooked, several with links to the Afro-Atlantic world. The resulting harmonic convergence of these various objects unfurls with a welcoming anthem in the form of Terry Adkins’s monumental wind instrument ensemble, “Last Trumpet,” and with a glowing fanfare in Agnes Martin’s 1963 gold-leaf painting “Friendship.”

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Persons: Ellsworth Kelly, Elizabeth Murray, Amy Sillman, Grace Wales Bonner, Terry, Agnes Martin’s, ” Organizations: of Modern Art Locations: London