Grace Wales Bonner Takes Ivy

It’s getting to be something of a habit: Grace Wales Bonner released another revelation of a collection this weekend. Called “Black Sunlight,” it was the third collection in a three-season project exploring the relationship between Jamaica and England. Her first, released last January, was called “Lover’s Rock,” which was also the name of the second film in British director Steve McQueen’s miniseries, Small Axe, which he released late last year, around the same time Wales Bonner’s initial collection began arriving in stores. I asked her whether they’d been in touch. “We haven’t really connected,” she said in a phone call last week, “but I think what’s interesting is that I can see the references that he might have been looking at, and see how someone interprets something through cinema from [the same] archival material.” Well, McQueen should reach out. A McQueen-Wales Bonner pairing would be a historic meeting. Both projects plumb the historical record for inspiration without losing fidelity to their source material—and are even more powerful for that reason. Read more at GQ.