Carrie Moyer: Interstellar by Kim Noonan

CARRIE MOYER INTERSTELLAR WORCESTER ART MUSEUM /

W W W . W O R C E S T E R A R T. O R G

The Stone Age detail

CARRIE MOYER: INTERSTELLAR February 11 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 19, 2012

Organized by Susan L. Stoops

WOR CE ST E R A RT MU S EU M Worcester, Massachusetts

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

CARRIE MOYER: INTERSTELLAR February 11 – August 19, 2012 This exhibition and publication are generously supported by the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund. Additional support is provided by CANADA, New York. © 2012 Worcester Art Museum 55 Salisbury Street / Worcester, Massachusetts 01609 / www.worcesterart.org All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. All works by Carrie Moyer are ©Carrie Moyer Photographs of Vitrine, Frieze, and Red Widow and details of The Stone Age and Numina by Stephen Briggs. All other photography courtesy of the Artist and CANADA, New York. Designed by Kim Noonan Printed by Miles Press, Worcester MA Fonts: Trade Gothic Condensed Eighteen / Oblique ISBN: 978-0-936042-01-5 Cover: Barbute Inside front cover: Into the Woods, detail Inside back cover: Down Underneath, detail

The Stone Age

CARRIE MOYER: INTERSTELLAR

“Politics and art tend to have many, often subtle connections. Who can separate the populist upheavals of the 20 th century – notably the Russian Revolution and May ’68 – from the idealistic impulses of modernism? My paintings may have become less explicit, but my ambition to seduce viewers into reflecting on their own conditions – optical, physical, historical and otherwise – remains undiminished. Painting is a very intimate delivery system.” 1

—Carrie Moyer

Carrie Moyer’s painting practice over the past two decades has been shaped by her identification with the radicalism of art, politics, and feminism of the 1960s-1970s, as well as her formal training in both painting and computer graphic design. Moyer’s deep engagement with the medium’s potential of melding beauty and message and her exploration of the roles of illusion and content in abstraction have identified her as one of painting’s most innovative contemporary practitioners. A few years ago, art critic Barry Schwabsky observed that “the pursuit of abstraction is always to some extent a mode of resistance.”2 For artists of Moyer’s generation, abstract painting is no longer conceived within a utopian ideology in the tradition of Kazimir Malevich or Wassily Kandinsky. Neither is it understood as a revelation of authentic individual psyche in the manner of Jackson Pollock and his peers, nor recognized as an incidence of pure opticality as practiced by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. It is, however, again at the center of aesthetic discourse. When Robert Motherwell wrote about modernist abstraction in 1951, it was in terms of artists turning away from the world of form through a series of “rejections” of “whole worlds – the world of objects, the world of power and propaganda, the world of anecdotes, the world of fetishes and ancestor worship…”3 As a post-modern practice, abstract painting has persisted for decades in the wake of the radical re-orientation of the 1960s, when artistic strategies in a range of media began to address a world which “existed far outside art,”4

engendering a plurality of forms including pop-inspired images, minimalist objects, earthworks, video art, performance art, conceptual practices, and feminist identity politics. Today, in a cultural landscape characterized by an unrelenting stream of images and dominated by electronic media and digital technology, abstract painting might again be considered what Schwabsky described as “an art for aesthetic dissidents.”5 While not a unified project, abstract painting in its current state (criticized by some as contaminated while applauded by most as inclusive) is a conceptually driven practice that regularly engages its modernist history in an attempt to locate its relevance as a signifier of 21st century experience. Distinguished by an embrace of the social, Moyer’s approach to abstract painting is unusually affirming, generating connections between human history and contemporary experience. She challenges the autonomous tradition of authorship at the heart of modernism by openly engaging the iconographies and processes of other artists, cultures, and periods resulting in a hybrid of the specific and the shared, the invented and the renewed. Moyer’s paintings, rich with concurrences of aesthetics at the margins and in the centers, redeploy the now-signature shapes and gestures of many of modernism’s innovators (Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keefe, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, Kay Sage, Frankenthaler, and Louis, among others) while creating chains of non-hierarchical associations across time, media, and ideologies – prehistory and modern, graphic arts and painting, Color Field abstraction and Surrealism. “Painting,” Moyer has said, “is about intersections in history.”6

Vitrine

Furbelow

Skullspout

Artist/Activist Beginnings

Chromatic Extremes

Moyer was born in Detroit in 1960 to young parents who lived nomadic lives that were “sustained by blue-collar jobs and back-to-the-land values.”7 She was sensitized early on to the radicalism signaled by the politics and graphics of the peace and women’s movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Encouraged as a child to make art in a studio her mother set up at home, Moyer went on to study painting at Pratt where she received a BFA in 1985. In the early 1990s, during a period of politicization and disillusionment with painting (which she ceased to practice from 1988-1993), Moyer was a practicing graphic designer (she earned an MA in computer graphic design from the New York Institute of Technology in 1990). During this time, she also became involved with gay civil rights activism, participating in ACT UP demonstrations and later joining Queer Nation and the Lesbian Avengers. From 1991-2004, Moyer and Sue Schaffner co-founded Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), a 2-person agitprop operation that promoted lesbian awareness through public graphic art projects.8

Moyer’s involvement with acrylic paints since the 1990s and her selfdescribed desire to extract “some new visceral, optical, sensual experiences out of these polymers”14 can be traced to her interest in the medium’s cultural history as an industrial product.15 Experiments with synthetic materials and commercial colors developed in the 1950s and 1960s regularly associated with the fields of advertising and design included a range of pioneering moments in the history of late modernist painting: Pollock’s all-over webs of poured Duco enamel and aluminum paints; Frankenthaler’s hedonistic stains of liquid acrylic directly onto raw canvas; Louis’s transparent veils of thinned Magna; Gerhard Richter’s readymade color chart enamel paintings; Frank Stella’s controlled arcs of fluorescent Day-Glo; Alighiero Boetti’s deadpan monochromes of sprayed industrial paint on cast iron; and Lynda Benglis’s unconstrained pools of latex paints and polyurethanes. When Moyer returned to painting in the 1990s, she heard “a lot about this custom paint store called ‘Guerra Paint’ in the East Village. The founder, Art Guerra, was a chemist who worked in the automobile industry and he was making pigment and polymer binder available to artists to essentially make their own acrylic paint. The color was very intense and vibrant and, since I was trying to reinvent my studio practice, I decided to try it out.”16

Over time, however, the collaborative creative process and communicative clarity of graphic design led to Moyer’s desire to resume painting and return to the things she missed: “the solitude of the studio,” “making things by hand,” and “the pleasure of not making sense.”9 Moyer credits her decision in 1998 to go to graduate school to study painting at Bard College with her realization that, “it was okay to combine what I’d learned working on the computer with my art practice.”10 At Bard, Moyer immersed herself in the history of agitprop and graphics including the influential works of Sister Corita Kent, Emory Douglas (the Black Panther Party) and Atelier Populaire (May ’68 in France). She also began “treating painting techniques and gestures as a kind of language system, borrowing my approach from graphic design, where cutting and pasting between styles is second nature… art history suddenly became an immense, vital resource.”11 Since then, Moyer’s painting practice has been one of integrating the languages of the graphic arts and abstract painting and synthesizing them into a unique visual hybrid: “I wanted to marry the flatness of poster space to the more sensual signifiers of painting.”12

“ Subjective and objective, physically fixed and culturally constructed, absolutely proper and endlessly displaced, color can appear as an unthinkable scandal.” 13

—Stephen Melville

Being in a room surrounded by Moyer’s paintings, one immediately senses the central role color plays in her project of fusing pleasure and provocation. Used for both its seductive as well as subversive potential, and as a vehicle to delineate as well as disrupt form, color in Moyer’s work is resistant to naming while at the same time it is essential to communication. Moyer, at mid-career, has distinguished herself as an extreme colorist in the company of fellow abstract painters such as Katharina Grosse, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, Beatriz Milhazes, and Philip Taaffe, as well as mixed media artists Jim Isermann, Jim Lambie, Anselm Reyle, and Jessica Stockholder – artists whose works embrace the excessive potentials of color and amplify the opulent chromatic effects first explored in the context of a postwar material world by precursors like Louis (synthetic pigments), Dan Flavin (fluorescent lights), and Lucio Fontana (glitter-encrusted monochromes). Moyer’s now-virtuosic, choreographed acrylic pours did not begin in direct reference to their most obvious art historical counterpart, Color Field painting (which she considered at the time “a kind of big, pretty painting that decorated corporate lobbies”), but because, “I was using a lot of recognizable symbols and iconography and I wanted something to stand in for the bodily aspect of painting… As I began to work with the Guerra acrylic, I started to read a lot about Frankenthaler, Louis, et al. Of course, I love the story of this young woman at Bennington College coming up with the revolutionary technique (I went to Bennington from 1978-79; I knew all about its history as the birthplace of modern dance in America but I knew nothing of Greenberg, Helen F., et al). I started looking at Color Field paintings really closely; the Met cleaned an incredible Louis which convinced me that his paintings are incredibly spatial. I went to the National Gallery and saw [Frankenthaler’s] Mountains and Sea, Newman’s Stations of the Cross, and all the other great paintings from that time period. They had a big effect on me.”17

Numina

Numina detail

“There will always be a Puritan strain in society that gets nervous if things are too pleasurable, too beautiful or too open. That’s the most significant legacy of feminist art; it taught us not to be afraid to express these things.” 19

—Lynda Benglis

Abstract Painting and Feminism Moyer’s deep engagement with feminism, beginning as a young artist/activist in her early twenties, is critical to understanding her relation to abstract painting. In the art establishment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, abstract painting’s status was under duress from many fronts and seen as an outmoded, male-dominated language that was lacking theoretical criticality. The spaces and practices of post-modern abstract painting were relatively unwritten scripts then and seemingly more available to women – in other words, it had become a rogue language appropriate to those considered at the margins or “outsiders.” Many women sensed that there was a real (albeit ironic) permissiveness in the face of its perceived irrelevance and the critical indifference it accrued. This convergence of feminism and abstract painting not only introduced a gendered perspective and content that included reclaiming the decorative, re-imagining beauty, rehabilitating craft, and re-purposing the grid, but also challenged the conventional belief that abstract painting was ineffectual in engaging the politics of contemporary experience. Among the painters of the previous generation whose feminist practices have shaped Moyer’s own, she cites Harmony Hammond as a true “mentor.” Hammond, whose work as an artist, writer, and occasional curator often regarded issues of class as well as her identity as a lesbian artist, was a founding member of the collective who published the groundbreaking magazine Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Moyer interned at the magazine’s office from 1984-1986, and remembers it as “an experience that was incredibly important in terms of my own introduction to feminist artists from the older generation as well as my own.”20 In her Floorpieces (1973), Hammond recycled the material and process of the braided rug with the effect of bringing lived experience (and touch, not mark) into the realm of abstract painting. Moyer credits Hammond’s first book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art, and Martial Arts, which she first read while a student at Pratt in the mid 1980s, as “very influential… I began to think about art in the context of everyday life.”21

Mary Heilmann and Elizabeth Murray were rule-breaking mentors whose influences Moyer indirectly absorbed. Each infused abstract painting with gendered content and flirted with the recognizable, making (in very different ways) paintings which were intended to be experienced in relation to things in her world. Heilmann’s synthesis of improvisation and geometric structure samples from a range of cultural allusions faux wood grain, tile-like patterns and ceramic glazes, Mexican serapes, popular music – with the effect of exposing how color carries cultural traces and gendered associations. Murray’s biomorphic imagery unabashedly engaged in overt playfulness, garish color, and abstract eroticism, the latter of which would become in the 1980s more explicit albeit coded in the forms of domestic vessels and utensils.22 For Moyer and her generation, Lynda Benglis’s example has been profound, especially her reclamation of vernacular materials and forms that embrace the excessive, the decorative, the sensuous, and the irreverent. Glitter in many of Moyer’s paintings functions formally as “another light source,”23 but also emulates Benglis’s subversive and flamboyant use of the kitschy material in her sculptural “knots” from the 1970s, which was intended as a challenge to “good taste” and the minimalist aesthetic of the day.24 In her radical redefinition of painting in the late 1960s, Benglis dispensed with the conventional canvas support, pouring latex directly from buckets onto the floor where the pools of brilliant pigment were left to harden into “fallen” paintings. Perhaps most relevant for Moyer’s painting is the way Benglis’s works retain a sensual liquidity and a corporeal memory of the artist’s body in motion. Carolee Schneemann was teaching at Bard when Moyer was studying there. Initially trained as a painter, Schneemann is recognized as a pioneer of feminist performance art, whose unconventional work in the 1960s and 1970s consistently engaged the nude body as a medium and regularly referenced the processes and politics of abstract painting (Abstract Expressionism, in particular) as well as making connections between painting, sexuality, and social revolution. Schneemann “often described painting as a performative act,” recalled Moyer. “As I began using pours of acrylic paint – in order to bring more moodily, nonlinear elements into my work – her words were on my mind.”25

Frieze

An “Interstellar” Genealogy Beginning in 2005, in what is now considered a breakthrough body of work, Moyer strategically began to incorporate into her paintings iconic forms and production processes from a range of cultural pasts – “stars” anonymous and named – which were of particular interest to her: prehistoric objects, modernist abstraction, agitprop graphics, and feminist craft strategies. She sought to redeploy those signifiers in ways that emphasize the sensual and challenge the possibilities of what can be depicted or expressed by particular paint applications. In paintings from 2006-2009, including those from The Stone Age and Arcana series, vaguely familiar shapes evoking prehistoric figurines and ceramic vessels, helmets and headdresses, insects and bones, emerge from lush layers of poured acrylic, incidents of glitter, and passages of fingerprints. Moyer wrote that when she started on The Stone Age body of paintings, “I was looking for forms that were nearly recognizable and that generated the preliterate force of the Venus of Willendorf. I trolled the Web, used bookstores, and museums looking for ritual vessels, sculptural “prosthetics” (headdresses, masks, armor, and weapons) and ethnographic oddities that could be morphed into fearsome and/or sexualized silhouettes.”26 Prehistoric goddess-like figures dance across the canvas in The Stone Age27; shapes suggesting an eclectic group of terracotta figurines are displayed in the shallow space of Vitrine. In a pair of related canvases from 2007, vessel forms are dramatically silhouetted against dark grounds. Furbelow features a curving Jomon period Japanese vase anthropomorphized with breasts and nipples; Skullspout re-imagines a Meso-American pot in the shape of a skull. When asked what motivated her to look at ancient ceramics, Moyer explained that she was reflecting on ideas and imagery she had encountered in her early 20s, “when I was first discovering the Feminist Art Movement… I read a bunch of books like Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman, which used pre-historic artifacts to re-map art history and include women. I was very earnest about finding some antecedents, a place for myself in the long stream of art-makers… Returning to ancient ceramics in the mid-2000s, I wanted to find objects that referred to human form, but were also gorgeously stylized and abstract. I was looking for a ‘bridge’ to abstraction which is where I ultimately wanted to end up (my first love as a teenage artist).”28 The highly abstracted “bodies” (both phallic and feminine) that Moyer reclaimed reference vastly different worlds with varying degrees of arcane or identifiable imagery: a trio of guardian spirits (Numina), a regal spider/woman (Red Widow), a colossal stone effigy (Rapa Nui Smashup), a mutant of helmet and bone (Barbute). In the expansive Frieze, the simple silhouette of four contiguous figures in a flat poster-like space is made complex, first by the illusion of a red string (a painted line made with paint-soaked twine) that passes around and over and under each figure’s neck, and second by the fluid interplay of colors, textures, and spaces that occur within the figures. As a result of Moyer’s deft orchestration, typically incompatible artistic realities co-exist, whether normally contradictory colors (palettes inspired by clay, flesh, and bone living amidst a synthetic sampler of fluorescent pinks, oranges, greens, and blues) or textures (matt/shimmering, solid/transparent, poured/printed). With these canvases, Moyer achieves a fusion of graphic clarity and abstract mystery, illusionism and flatness, accident and control, expertly integrating areas of bare canvas, defined contours, illusionistic shadows, and uncontained pigment into unique hybrids.

Before painting, Moyer works out compositions in small taped paper collages, “mostly very simple black-and-white shapes cut from paper, which serve as a kind of drawing for me.” 29 Her actual painting process, in contrast, is a highly choreographed performance (starting with the canvas on the floor) which includes pouring, patterning (often with fingerprints), staining, drawing, and applying paint with rollers and brushes. Layers of contrasting stylistic, color, and spatial relationships regularly subvert our expectations of how a painting was made, as well as which gestures were premeditated and which were intuitive. Complementing the performative nature of her pours and their identification with the remembered body, numerous passages of hand and finger prints intimately memorialize the touch of the artist’s fingers. On more than one occasion, Moyer has referred to her interest in aspects of Surrealist painting (“a guilty pleasure”30), in particular its engagement with free-associational processes and the textural innovations including frottage (rubbing) and grattas (scraping) of Max Ernst. “Ernst is an artist I return to often… there are so many ways that he has made us aware of this touch, his intimacy with his materials and understanding how they work optically.”31 Like Ernst, Moyer paints with the knowledge that texture in painting is understood as a function of both seeing (by us) and touching (by her). Recent canvases from the Canonical series (2010-11) move away from the flatness and icon-like motifs of earlier works. In The Tiger’s Wife, Down Underneath, and Into the Woods (all 2011), complex compositions of sinewy lines, shifting spaces, and biomorphic forms encourage ambiguity and instability. Matte black silhouettes counter a palette realized in synthetic acrylics but inspired in part by the natural world of sunsets, woods, clouds, turquoise skies (following stays at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire and a trip to New Mexico). In the context of this revised palette, Moyer’s floating, touching, and interpenetrating shapes suggest places in which bodies and landscapes, interiors and exteriors, commingle. This expansive shift in her paintings’ focus can be attributed to Moyer’s increased technical confidence as a painter as well as a personal maturity. She recently noted, “These days, I’m less preoccupied by my social condition, by the boundaries, as it were, around my body. In other words, I’m more focused on the textural implications of painting itself than on the textual aspects of any particular image.”32 With none of the contrasting elements in Moyer’s new paintings taking priority over another – layers of aqueous color, hard-edged shapes, illusionistic shadows, drawn marks, textured surfaces, or raw canvas – each painting’s uniquely complex nature remains integral to one’s experience of seeing. And that experience seems to be less about seeking resolution than sensing the multifaceted nature of one’s consciousness. “Seeing” in the context of Moyer’s abstraction promises an engagement that extends beyond the boundaries of her painted canvases and delivers stimulation that can be highly optical but also profoundly psychic and somatic, ranging from dazzling disorientation to corporeal consciousness. Moyer recently said, “Right now I am interested in making work that instigates many kinds of conversation.”33 Moyer’s paintings are invitations to participate (whether by intention or sheer seduction) in the “interstellar” discourse which is at the heart of her artistic enterprise. Susan L. Stoops Curator of Contemporary Art

Red Widow

Study collage for Barbute

Notes 1. 2.

Carrie Moyer, interviewed by Steel Stillman, “In the Studio: Carrie Moyer,” Art in America, September, 2011, 126. Barry Schwabsky, “The Resistance of Painting: On Abstraction,” The Nation, December 16, 2009, www.thenation.com

Thomas McEvilley, “Seeking the Primal through Paint: The Monochrome Icon,” in The Exile’s Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1993), 49.

David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 109.

Schwabsky, “The Resistance of Painting: On Abstraction.”

Bob Nickas, Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2009), 50.

Steel Stillman, introduction to “In the Studio: Carrie Moyer,” Art in America, September, 2011, 121.

Ibid., 121

Moyer, “In the Studio: Carrie Moyer,” 122.

10. Ibid., 123. 11. Ibid., 125. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. Stephen Melville, “Colour Has Not Yet Been Named: Objectivity in Deconstruction,” in Seams: Art as Philosophical Context – Essays by Stephen Melville, ed. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (Amsterdam: G + B Arts, 1996), 141. 14. Moyer, interviewed by Phong Bui, “In Conversation: Carrie Moyer with Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail, September, 2011, www.brooklynrail.org 15. Moyer referred me, as she does her painting students, to David Batchelor’s concise and brilliant meditation on color in Western culture, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).

16. Moyer in correspondence with the author, 2012. 17. Ibid. 18. Moyer, “In the Studio: Carrie Moyer,” 125. 19. Lynda Benglis (1989) quoted in press release (October 8, 2009) for Lynda Benglis, Irish Museum of Modern Art, November 4, 2009January 24, 2010, www.imma.ie 20. Moyer, “In Conversation: Carrie Moyer with Phong Bui.” 21. Ibid. 22. Robert Storr, Elizabeth Murray (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005), 36. 23. Moyer, “In Conversation: Carrie Moyer with Phong Bui.” 24. Also relevant is the work of John Armleder, an artist of Benglis’s generation who, like Moyer, values the cultural “baggage” associated with pouring paint and incorporating glitter. 25. Moyer, “In the Studio: Carrie Moyer,” 124. 26. In conversation about this painting with the author in July 2011, Moyer noted inspiration also from Nancy Spero’s reclamation of the powerful symbolism of ancient goddesses for her 2004 mosaic in the Lincoln Center subway station. 27. Moyer in The Studio Reader, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 166. 28. Moyer in correspondence with the author, 2012. 29. Moyer, “In Conversation: Carrie Moyer with Phong Bui.” 30. Moyer, “In the Studio: Carrie Moyer,” 126. 31. Moyer, “In Conversation: Carrie Moyer with Phong Bui.” 32. Moyer, “In the Studio: Carrie Moyer,” 126. 33. Moyer, “In Conversation: Carrie Moyer with Phong Bui.”

Rapa Nui Smashup

Works in the Exhibition The Stone Age 2006 Acrylic, glitter on canvas 60 x 84 inches Private Collection

Barbute 2009 Acrylic, glitter on canvas 90 x 60 inches Private Collection

Vitrine 2007 Acrylic on canvas 40 x 60 inches Private Collection, New York

Rapa Nui Smashup 2009 Acrylic, glitter on canvas 60 x 40 inches Courtesy of the Artist and CANADA, New York, NY

Furbelow 2007 Acrylic on canvas 24 x 18 inches Collection of Rachel Vancelette

Frieze 2009 Acrylic, glitter on canvas 45 x 86 inches Collection of Evelyn and Salomon Sassoon

Skullspout 2007 Acrylic, glitter on canvas 24 x 18 inches Courtesy of the Artist and CANADA, New York, NY

Down Underneath 2011 Acrylic on canvas 54 x 72 inches From the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Court Gebeau

Numina 2007 Acrylic, glitter, on canvas 72 x 60 inches Private Collection

Into the Woods 2011 Acrylic, glitter on canvas 72 x 72 inches Pizzuti Collection

Red Widow 2008 Acrylic, glitter on canvas 80 x 60 inches Courtesy of the Artist and the Artist Pension Trust (APT New York)

The Tigerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wife 2011 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 48 inches Hall Collection

CARRIE MOYER 1960 Born in Detroit EDUCATION 2001 M.F.A. Painting, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College 1995 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture 1990 M.A. Computer Graphic Design, New York Institute of Technology (with honors) 1985 B.F.A. Painting, Pratt Institute (cum laude) S OLO AND TWO -P ERSON EXHI BI TIONS 2012 Carrie Moyer: Interstellar, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA (catalog) 2011 Canonical, CANADA, New York, NY (catalog) 2009 Arcana, CANADA, New York, NY Carrie Moyer: Painting Propaganda, American University Museum at the Katzen Center for the Arts, American University, Washington, D.C. 2007 The Stone Age, CANADA, New York, NY Project: Rendition, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY. Collaboration by JC2: Joy Episalla, Joy Garnett, Carrie Moyer, and Carrie Yamaoka Black Gold, rowlandcontemporary, Chicago, IL Black Gold, Hunt Gallery, Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, VA 2006 Carrie Moyer and Diana Puntar, Samson Projects, Boston, MA 2004 Two Women: Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe, Palm Beach ICA, Palm Beach, FL (catalog) Sister Resister, Diverseworks, Houston, TX Façade Project, Triple Candie, New York, NY 2003 Chromafesto, CANADA, New York, NY 2002 Hail Comrade! Debs & Co., New York, NY The Bard Paintings, Gallery @ Green Street, Boston, MA Meat Cloud, Debs & Co., New York, NY Straight to Hell: 10 Years of Dyke Action Machine! Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Diverseworks, Houston, TX (traveling exhibition with catalog) 2000 God’s Army, Debs & Co., New York, NY GROUP EX HIBI TIO NS 2012 Risk and Reward, Foster Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Eau Claire, WI 2011 A Painting Show, Harris Lieberman, New York, NY Affinities: Painting in Abstraction, D’Ameilo Terras, New York, NY 2010 The Jewel Thief, Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY Pictures Captivate Us: Carrie Moyer & Jered Sprecher, Downtown Gallery, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN The Exquisite Corpse Project: Curated by David Salle, Klemens Gasser & Tania Grunert, New York, NY Ultrasonic IV: It’s Only Natural, Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Vivid, Schroeder Romero & Shredder, New York, NY Curated by Daniel Hesidence, Tracy Williams Ltd., New York, NY On PTG, Julius Caesar, Chicago, IL Raw State, 222 Shelby Street Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Love Never Dies, Form+Content Gallery, Minneapolis, MN 2009 Don’t Perish, Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte, New York, NY Artists Run Chicago, The Suburban @ Hyde Part Arts Center, Chicago, IL Yo Mama: Sheila Pepe and Friends, Naomi Arin Contemporary Art, Las Vegas, NV One Loses One’s Classics, White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO Infinite Possibilities, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY 2008 That Was Then...This Is Now, PS1/MoMA, Long Island City, NY Duck Soup, La Mama Galleria, New York, NY Convergences/Center Street Studio, Galerie Mourlot, New York, NY The Future Must Be Sweet — Lower East Side Printshop Celebrates 40 Years, International Print Center, New York, NY. Curator: Marilyn Kushner (catalog) Affinities: Painting in Abstraction, Berrie Center Art Galleries, Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, NJ Freeze Frame, Thrust Projects, New York, NY Unnameable Things, Artspace, New Haven, CT Reclaiming the “F” Word: Posters on International Feminisms, California State University, Northridge, CA Break the Rules! Sammlung Hieber/Theising, Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheim, Germany Publishing Prints: Selections from the Center Street Studio Archive, Lila and Joel Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond, Richmond VA Artcrush, Jenny Jaskey Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Beauty Is In the Streets, Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, NY 2007 Don’t Let the Boys Win: Kinke Kooi, Carrie Moyer, and Lara Schnitger, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA Curator: Jessica Hough Quiet Riot, March Gallery, New York, NY. Curators: Karolyn Hatton, Julian Kreimer Late Liberties, John Connelly Presents, New York, NY. Curator: Augusto Abrizo Shared Women, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA Curators: Eve Fowler, Emily Roysdon, A.L. Steiner Affinities: Painting in Abstraction, CCS Galleries, Hessel Museum, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Curator: Kate McNamara Beauty Is In the Streets, Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ Bound LES: Celebrating Contemporary Art on the Lower East Side, Abron Arts Center, New York, NY Absolute Abstraction, Judy Ann Goldman Fine Arts, Boston, MA New Prints/Spring 2007, IPCNY/International Print Center New York, New York, NY. Curator: James Sienna Mother, May I? Campbell Soapy Gallery, Lesbian and Gay Community Center, New York, NY. Curator: Sheila Pepe Hot and Cold: Abstract Prints from the Center Street Studio, Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons College, Boston, MA Fragments of Change, Ernst Rubenstein Gallery, Educational Alliance, New York, NY

2006 Group Exhibition, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY Papering, Deutsche Bank, New York, NY. Curators: Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, Holly Block When Artists Say We, Artists Space, New York, NY. Curators: Andrea Geyer, Christian Rattemeyer Ridykeulous, Participant, Inc., New York, NY. Curators: Nicole Eisenman, A.L. Steiner Do You Think I’m Disco? Longwood Art Gallery, Bronx, NY. Curator: Edwin Ramoran 2005 BAM Next Next Visual Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY. Curator: Dan Cameron Around About Abstraction, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC. Curator: Ron Platt New York’s Finest, CANADA, New York ev+a, Limerick, Ireland. Curator: Dan Cameron (catalog) Dissent, SPACES, Cleveland, OH USA, Hoy: Pintura y Escultura, Galeria Marlborough, Madrid, Spain Group Exhibition, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY 2005 New Prints 2005/Winter, IPCNY/International Print Center New York, New York, NY Twofold: Collaborations on Campus, Richard L. Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection, Univ. of California, Davis, CA 2004 Republican Like Me, Parlour Projects, Brooklyn, NY About Painting, Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Curator: Ian Berry LTTR Explosion, Art in General, New York, NY Watch What We Say, Schroeder Romero, Brooklyn, NY Cakewalk, Ambrosino Gallery, Miami, FL Timeless/Timeliness, Aljira Contemporary Arts Center, Newark, NJ (catalog) 2003 Ameri©an Dre@m: A Survey, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age, CBGB’s 313 Gallery, New York, NY; SFMOMA Artist Gallery, San Francisco, CA (traveling exhibition). Curator: Carrie McLaren Adventures in Abstraction, Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, Boston, MA Art Against Apathy, Zmelt, Amsterdam, the Netherlands 2002 Unjustified, Apexart, New York, NY. Curator: Kerry James Marshall (catalog) 2001 Artist-In-Residence Biennial, Ewing Gallery, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (catalog) Queer Commodity, Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia Raw Womyn, Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, Athens, GA 2001 Stand Up Dick & Jane, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland. Curator: Alan Phelan (catalog) Smile, Here, New York, NY Beyond the Center, Bard College, Red Hook, NY MFA Thesis Exhibition, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, Red Hook, NY 2000 The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Debs & Co., New York, NY The Biggest Games in Town, Künstlerwerkstatt Lothringer Strasse, Munich, Germany The Color of Friendship, Shedhalle, Zürich, Switzerland 1999 Free Coke, Greene Naftali, New York, NY Gender Trouble, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany. Curators: Lutz Hieber, Gisela Theising Close to You, Gallery @ Green Street, Boston, MA. Curator: Sheila Pepe Size Matters, GALE Gates, Brooklyn, NY Jahresgaben 1999, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany. Curators: Susanne Titz, Wilhelm Schürmann Zone of Risibility, Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Curator: Carrie Cooperider 1998 Message To Pretty, Threadwaxing Space, New York, NY. Curator: Lia Gangitano (catalog) Summer Show, Debs & Co., New York, NY Freedom, Liberation and Change: Revisiting 1968, Longwood Arts Gallery, Bronx, NY. Curator: Betti-Sue Hertz 1997 Vraiment: Féminisme et Art, Le Magasin, Centre National D’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France. Curator: Laura Cottingham (catalog) Revolution Girl-Style, Messepalast/Museumquartier, Vienna, Austria. Curators: Annette Baldauf, Katherina Weingartner (catalog) The 21st Annual National/International Studio Artists Exhibition, PS1/Institute for Contemporary Art, New York, NY Hollywood Premiere, Hollywood Premiere Motel, Los Angeles, CA Patriotism, The Lab, San Francisco, CA 1996 Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Curator: Ellen Lupton (catalog) Gender, Fucked, Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA. Curators: Harmony Hammond, Catherine Lord Portraiture, White Columns, New York, NY. Curator: Paul Ha Counterculture: Alternative Information from the Underground Press to the Internet, Exit Art/The First World, New York, NY. Curators: Melissa Rachleff, Brian Wallis 1995 In A Different Light, University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA. Curators: Nayland Blake, Lawrence Rinder, Amy Scholder (catalog) Printed at the Lower East Side Printshop: 30 Artists, La Mama Galleria, New York, NY You Are Missing Plenty If You Don’t Buy Here: Images of Consumerism in American Photography, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Curator: Rebecca Lawton Re-Configuring the Figure, Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven, CT Copy-Art, Oldenburg University, Oldenburg, Germany 1994 Amendments, Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY. Curator: Sara Kellner Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall, New York Public Library, New York, NY No More Nice Girls, ABC No Rio, New York, NY Paperworks: Prints From the Lower Eastside Printshop, Rockland Community College, NY 1993 SILENCE=DEATH, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich and Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, Germany Kunst und AIDS, International AIDS Conference, Berlin, Germany

B I B LI O G R APH Y 2012 Buszek, Maria Elena. “Eros and Thanatos: Surrealism’s Legacy in Contemporary Feminist Art.” In Ilene Susan Fort, Tere Arcq and Teri Geis, eds., In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (Munich: Prestel Verlag; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2012). 2011 Bui, Phong. “In Conversation: Carrie Moyer with Phong Bui.” The Brooklyn Rail, September 2011. Cameron, Dan. “Roving Eye: Dan Cameron’s Week in Review.” www.artinamerica.com, March 4, 2011. “Carrie Moyer.” The New Yorker, October 7, 2011. Coates, Jennifer. “Review: Carrie Moyer, Canonical.” Time Out New York, September 27, 2011. Keeting, Zachary and Christopher Joy. “Carrie Moyer at CANADA, Sept 2011.” Gorky’s Granddaughter, September 29, 2011. Lowenstein, Drew. “From Cherry Bomb to Cherry Blossom: Carrie Moyer at CANADA.” www.ArtCritical.com, October 2, 2011. Peetz, John Arthur. “Critics’ Picks: Carrie Moyer.” www.artforum.com, October 2011. Princenthal, Nancy. “The Jewel Thief: Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.” Art in America, January 2011. Schambelan, Elizabeth. “Carrie Moyer at CANADA,” Artforum, December 2011. Smith, Roberta. “Free-for-All Spirit Breezes into Art Fair.” The New York Times, March 4, 2011. Stillman, Steel. “Carrie Moyer in the Studio,” Art in America, September 2011. 2010 Butler, Cornelia and Alexandra Schwartz, eds. Modern Women: Women Artists in the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010). Jaskey, Jenny. “Vivid: Female Currents in Painting. Schroeder Romero & Shredder.” Art Lies, Issue 67, 2010. Smith, Roberta. “Varieties of Abstraction.” The New York Times, August 5, 2010. 2009 Carlin, T.J. “Carrie Moyer: Arcana.” Time Out New York, May 21-27, 2009. “Carrie Moyer.” The New Yorker, June 1, 2009. Kley, Elizabeth. “Gotham Art and Theatre.” www.artnet.com, May 20, 2009. Mueller, Stephen. “Carrie Moyer at CANADA.” Art in America, October 2009. Nickas, Bob. Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2009). Rosenberg, Karen. “Carrie Moyer: Arcana.” The New York Times, May 15, 2009. Schwendener, Martha. “Introducing Heide Hatry, William Lamson, and Carrie Moyer.” Village Voice, July 20, 2009. 2008 “Freeze Frame.” Time Out New York, January 24-30, 2008. Nickas, Bob. “Best of 2008: Abstract Painting.” Artforum, December 2008. Olson, Craig. “Freeze Frame: Thrust Projects, January 11 - February 24, 2008.” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2008. 2007 Baker, Kenneth. “Women’s Art at Mills Mixes Defiance, Humor.” San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2007. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Review: Carrie Moyer.” Artforum, April 2007. “Carrie Moyer.” The New Yorker, February 12, 2007. Fry, Naomi. “Critics Picks: Carrie Moyer,” www.artforum.com, January 2007. Goodbody, Bridget L. “Late Liberties.” The New York Times, August 3, 2007. Hirsch, Faye. “Carrie Moyer at CANADA.” Art in America, June 2007. Holliday, Frank. “Abstraction Reconsidered.” Gay City News, July 26, 2007. “Late Liberties.” The New Yorker, August 20, 2007. Kazakina, Katya, “Beer Show, Trendy Puppies, Glitter Pieces: Chelsea Galleries.” www.Bloomberg.com, August 22, 2007. Maine, Stephen. “Addressing Liberty without Literality.” The New York Sun, August 2, 2007. Mueller, Stephen. “Lesbian Cubism.” Gay City News, January 18, 2007. Robinson, Walter. “Weekend Update.” www.artnet.com, January 22, 2007. Smith, Roberta. “Carrie Moyer: The Stone Age, New Paintings.” The New York Times, February 2, 2006. Barliant, Claire. “Critics Picks: ‘Do You Think I’m Disco’.” www.artforum.com, February 2006. Cotter, Holland. “Do You Think I’m Disco.” The New York Times, February 3, 2006. Daderko, Dean. “A Mirrorball to Liberation.” Gay City News, January 26 - February 1, 2006. Genocchio, Benjamin. “Exploring the Effects of Disco’s Beat.” The New York Times, February 19, 2006. McQuaid, Cate. “Radiating Color.” Boston Globe, February 23, 2006. Ripo, Marisa. “Ridykeulous Gets Serious.” NY Arts Magazine, July/August 2006. Smyth, Cherry. “Review: Carrie Moyer and Diana Puntar.” Modern Painters, May 2006. 2005 Smith, Roberta. “New York’s Finest.” The New York Times, February, 11, 2005. Levi Strauss, David and Daniel Joseph Martinez. “Teaching After the End.” Art Journal, vol. 64, no. 3, Fall 2005. “The Second Annual New Prints Review.” Art on Paper, vol. 10, no. 2, November/December 2005. 2004 Barnett, Kari. “Summer Exhibition Opens at PBICA.” Lake Worth Forum, June 29, 2004. Bischoff, Dan. “Aljira’s Emerge 2003 Presents Amazing Examples of Technique.” The Sunday Star-Ledger, August 15, 2004. Feinstein, Roni. “Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe at the Palm Beach ICA.” Art in America, December 2004. Feinstein, Roni. “Exhibit Highlights ‘Two Women’ on Different Paths.” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, August 11, 2004. Greenfield, Beth. “Designs on You.” Time Out New York, September 23-30, 2004. Halden, Loann. “Art, Activism and Intimacy.” TWN: The Weekly News, July 8, 2004. Holliday, Frank. “A Partnership of Ideals.” Gay City News, August 5 - 11, 2004. Joy, Jenn. “Two Women: Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe.” Contemporary, Issue 68, 2004. McQuiston, Liz. Graphic Agitation 2: Social and Political Graphics in the Digital Age (New York: Phaidon Press, 2004). “Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art.” Citylink, June 30 - July 6, 2004. Schwan, Gary. “Diverse Offerings of ‘Two Women’.” The Palm Beach Post, June 20, 2004. Schwan, Gary. “Body of Works Reflects Artist’s Care for Their Craft.” The Palm Beach Post, July 4, 2004. Sheffield, Skip. “Two Women Artists, Three Small Deaths.” Boca Raton/Delray Beach News, June 25 – July 1, 2004. Sjostrom, Jan, “Two-Woman Show Depicts Hands-On Art,” Palm Beach Daily News, July 18-21, 2004. Smith, Roberta. “Republican Like Me.” The New York Times, September 10, 2004. Smith, Roberta. “Caution: Angry Artists at Work.” The New York Times, August 27, 2004. “Tom Johnson/Carrie Moyer.” The New Yorker, January 12, 2004. Turner, Elisa. “A Nuanced Past is Transformed into the Present.” The Miami Herald, August 18, 2004. Yee, Ivette. “The Female Perspective.” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, July 15, 2004.

2003 Costello, Devon and Esme Wantanabe. “Ameri©an Dre@m.” NY Arts Magazine, March 24, 2003. Levin, Kim. “Art Listings: Carrie Moyer.” The Village Voice, January 1-7, 2003. Levin, Kim. “Art Listings: Ameri©an Dre@m.” The Village Voice, March 19-25, 2003. McQuaid, Cate. “‘Adventures in Abstraction’ at Judy Goldman Fine Art.” Boston Globe, June 13, 2003. Rubinstein, Raphael. “8 Painters: New Work.” Art in America, November 2003. 2002 Cotter, Holland. “Unjustified.” The New York Times, March 1, 2002. Grubb, R.J. “Love, Peace & Work by Carrie Moyer.” Baywindows, February 5, 2002. Hopkins, Randi. “Stealing Beauty: Fashion, Photography, and Painting.” Boston Phoenix, January 5, 2002. McQuaid, Cate. “Revolution, Utopia and Other ’60s Dreamscapes.” Boston Globe, January 26, 2002. Parcellin, Paul. “Art Around Town: Carrie Moyer.” www. Retro-Rocket.com, February 2002. Strong, Lester. ”OUT 100: the Year’s Most Intriguing Gay People.” Out, December 2002. Yablonsky, Linda. “Unjustified: Apex Art.” Time Out New York, February 14-21, 2002. 2001 Atkins, Robert. Straight to Hell: 10 Years of Dyke Action Machine! Exh. cat. (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; New York: Dyke Action Machine, 2001). Atkins, Robert. “Girls with Wheatpaste and Webspace.” The Media Channel, May 2001. Blake, Nayland. Stand Fast Dick & Jane. Exh. cat. (Dublin: The Project, 2001). Clark, Emilie and Lytle Shaw, eds. Shark, Issue 3, Winter, 2001. Cvetkovich, Ann. “Fierce Pussies and Lesbian Avengers.” In Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka, eds., Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Dunne, Aiden. “Taking Art to the Edges of Life and Death.” The Irish Times, July 4, 2001. Nahas, Dominique. “Carrie Moyer at Debs & Co.” Art in America, April 2001. Ruane, Medb. “Outer Limits.” The Sunday Times, July 15, 2001. “Smile.” The New Yorker, June 18 & 25, 2001. 2000 Cotter, Holland. “Innovators Burst Onstage One (Ka-pow!) at a Time.” The New York Times, November 10, 2000. Delaney, Anngel. “For Art’s Sake.” The New York Blade, September 29, 2000. Delaney, Anngel. “Radical Re-visionary.” The New York Blade, September 8, 2000. Hammond, Harmony. Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (New York: Rizzoli, 2000). McCarthy, Joan E. “The Gallery @ Green Street: Close to You.” Art New England, December/January 2000. Robinson, Walter. “Weekend Update.” www.artnet.com, October 21, 2000. Simpson, Les. “Tripping Down Memory Lane.” Time Out New York, October 12, 2000. Teckel, Augustina. “D.A.M. Muffiosi.” (Not Only) One, 2000. 1999 Becker, Jochen. “Gegenöffentlichkeit hinter Glas.” Die Tageszeitung, June 26, 1999. Becker, Jochen. “Unbehagen der Geschlechter.” Kunstforum International, September-November, 1999. “Frauen & Gestaltung: Der Kleine Unterschied.” Page, December 1999. Glanz, Alexandra. “Das gesammelte Unbehagen.” Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, May 26, 1999. Haynes, Esther. “They’re Not Sisters.” Jane, December 1999. Miya-Jervis, Lisa. “Profile: Dyke Action Machine!” Bitch, Summer 1999. Reusch, Wera. “I want a dyke for president.” Köln StadtRevue, July 1999. Sherman, Mary. “Familiarity Breeds Content in Shows by Friends, Family.” Boston Herald, October 10, 1999. Siffrin-Peters, Annette. “Vom Unbehagen der Geschlechter.” Aachener Nachrichten, May 31, 1999. Tietenberg, Annette. “Überraschung in der Mittagspause.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 21, 1999. “Unbehagen der Geschlechter im Neuen Aachener Kunstverein.” Kunst-Bulletin, N. 7-8, July/August 1999. 1998 Che, Cathay. “DAM! Sell in Distress.” Time Out New York, July 1998. Loos, Tod. “Lesbian Poster Girls.” The Advocate, December 22, 1998. Rand, Erica. “Troubling Customs.” New Art Examiner, Summer 1998. Schlesinger, Toni and Guy Trebay. “Alphabet City.” The Village Voice, December 1998. 1997 Joselit, David. “Exhibiting Gender.” Art In America, January 1997. McQuiston, Liz. Suffragettes to She-Devils: Women’s Liberation and Beyond (New York: Phaidon Press, 1997). 1996 Hannaham, James. “Best of the Net: Dyke TV...” The Village Voice, October 1996. Harris, Elise. “Agit Pop.” Out, July 1996. Ingram, Gordon Brent. “In Search of Queer Space on the Internet.” Border/Lines, Fall 1996. Lippy, Tod. “Dial Tone.” Print VI, 1996). Lupton, Ellen. Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture (New York: Abrams, 1996). Smyth, Cherry. Damn Fine Art by New Lesbian Artists (London: Cassell, 1996). Straayer, Chris. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Tompkins, Betty and Robert Witz, eds. Appearances, No. 23, Summer 1996. 1995 Blake, Nayland, Lawrence Rinder, and Amy Scholder, eds. In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, Queer Practice (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995). Deitcher, David, ed. A Question Of Equality: Gay Politics In America Since Stonewall (New York: Scribner, 1995). “News from the Loop: Dyke Action Machine...” Flash Art, Summer 1995. Osman, Jena and Juliana Spahr, eds. “Documentary,” Chain #2, 1995. Shapiro, Carolyn. “Directed Action.” High Performance, Summer 1995. 1994 Atkins, Robert. “Scene & Heard.” The Village Voice, July 1994. Schorr, Collier. “Poster Girls.” Artforum, October 1994.

Into the Woods

Acknowledgments This exhibition and publication celebrate the achievements Carrie Moyer has made in the studio over the past six years. I had the pleasure of being introduced to Moyer in 1998 through her partner, artist Sheila Pepe, who co-organized with me a lively panel discussion, “Degrees of Narrative: A Conversation Between Visual Artists and Writers,” for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (where we were colleagues at the time) on which Moyer participated. I vividly recall Moyer’s articulate commitment to message but not at the expense of exquisite form. My first encounter with her canvases dates back to her first solo exhibition in 2000 with the New York gallery Debs & Co.; being together in the midst of those paintings and wrestling with the challenges they raised marked the beginning of my deep appreciation for her intellect and painting practice. Over the next decade, I made a point of seeing Moyer’s work at several solo exhibitions in New York at CANADA and in projects at colleagues’ galleries in the Boston area including Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, Samsøn, and the Gallery @ Green Street. It is a privilege to have this opportunity to reflect on the evolution of her painting and to share her work with the Museum’s audiences.

I am fortunate to work with many talented and dedicated colleagues at the Museum. For his enthusiasm for the contemporary program and this exhibition, I wish to express my appreciation to Matthias Waschek, Director. I also thank Jim Welu, Director Emeritus, and Louise Virgin, Curator of Asian Art for their early support for this project. Colleagues whose special efforts on this project were invaluable and to whom I am particularly indebted include Kim Noonan, Manager of Publications and Graphic Design; Patrick Brown, Exhibition Designer and Chief Preparator; Joseph Leduc, Registrar; Rita Albertson, Chief Conservator; Kate Dalton, Curatorial Assistant; Allison Berkeley, Manager of Communications; Deborah Aframe, Librarian; and Stephen Briggs, Photographer. Finally, I extend a heartfelt thanks to Carrie Moyer for accepting my invitation to collaborate on an exhibition for the Worcester Art Museum and for her intrepid contributions to contemporary abstract painting. S.L.S.

There are numerous individuals whose commitments to Moyer’s work and the Worcester Art Museum’s program in contemporary art have made it possible to organize this exhibition and to document the project with this publication. I extend my deepest thanks to Don and Mary Melville for their warm encouragement and ongoing financial commitment to bringing the work of leading contemporary artists to the Worcester Art Museum. To the lenders who have agreed to part temporarily with paintings in their collections, I am most appreciative: the Artist Pension Trust, Mr. and Mrs. Court Gebeau, the Hall Collection, the Pizzuti Collection, Evelyn and Salomon Sassoon, Rachel Vancelette, and those who wish to remain anonymous. For their generosity of expertise and resources, especially the assistance with loans for the exhibition, I am extremely grateful to the artist’s New York gallery representative, CANADA, in particular Suzanne Butler.

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Down Underneath

CARRIE MOYER INTERSTELLAR WORCESTER ART MUSEUM /

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