A Strengthening Conversation with Carrie Moyer

Photo: Thomas Brunot

Carrie Moyer (b. 1960) was born in Detroit, MI, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her vibrant paintings and works on paper critically interrogate the formal and conceptual conventions of painting while embracing an approach to abstraction rooted in optical pleasure. Moyer’s playful compositions, layered surfaces, and fluid forms, which freely oscillate between abstraction and representation, speak not only to her commitment to feminist political theory, but also to her deep investment in art history. As she explains, “What is political about my painting is its basis in my own experience. The work engages the history of 20th-century painting from the margins, a position defined by humor, exuberance, and disruption.”

Moyer studied modern dance at Bennington College before receiving her BFA from Pratt Institute, an MA in computer graphic design from New York Institute of Technology, and an MFA in painting from Bard College. While at Pratt, Moyer interned at Heresies, the seminal feminist journal on art and politics. After graduating, Moyer continued her social activism, creating a series of agitprop posters and works on paper. This early body of work, which explored the representation of queer women in mainstream media, led to the formation of Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!; 1991–2004), a collaborative public art project with the photographer Sue Schaffner. Inserting imagery of borderline stereotypical lesbian identity into various commercial contexts, Moyer and Schaffner plastered high-volume poster campaigns across the city. Often pasting over existing advertisements with their own agitprop images that centered and celebrated queer women, DAM! challenged the heteronormative nature of societal representation. Upon returning to painting, Moyer recalls, “Part of the friction was how could I bring the sentiment and urgency of the agitprop I’d made for queer organizations and Dyke Action Machine! into the studio. How does one render it through abstraction?”

Moyer’s history of social activism informs her approach to painting, which marries the graphic flatness of her posters with the more sensual material qualities of the medium. Expanding on processes common to Color Field painters, her practice involves drawing, pouring, staining, rolling, sprinkling, and mopping. At the same time, Moyer also employs strategies and techniques found in graphic design. Achieving multidimensional effects through gradation, transparency, and shadows, Moyer builds her images layer-by-layer, using thin veils of aqueous color, mirrored images, and outlined biomorphic forms. Her techniques obfuscate her paintings’ making to forward an unfettered, sensorial approach to looking—one divorced from the technical mechanics of construction. Further emphasizing the sensorial, since 1999, Moyer has incorporated glitter into her work. For the artist, glitter injects the “material language of queerness” into her compositions. “For me, glitter signified disco and gay icons such as Sylvester,” she explains. “... [Glitter represented] this other part of my life that seemingly didn’t jive with the seriousness of a painting practice.” Decades later, glitter has become a signature element in her paintings that, per Moyer, “draws a different kind of light to the canvas.”

Just as Moyer combines different techniques and media in her paintings, so too does she draw on a variety of source material to inform her compositions. Alluding to the natural world, yet transcending specific references, her approach centers feminist ideologies while simultaneously recalling the unexpected juxtapositions of Surrealists, who, like Moyer, sought to establish “new relationships, and new possibilities.” As the writer and critic Lauren O’Neill-Butler summarizes, “Moyer recommits to form and formalism in order to blow both up—that is, to show how abstraction is never really a retreat from gender or identity but rather one way of opening up new and exhilarating ideas about embodiment.”

Ultimately for Moyer, the disparate bodies of work that define her extensive practice, the agitprop posters and paintings, are one and the same. Together, they shed light on gender politics while also expanding and destabilizing traditional notions of abstraction. The artist concludes, “The posters and paintings share a declarative, public-facing voice that is transmitted through the use of symmetry and other framing devices, melding the idealistic fervor of twentieth-century abstraction and agitprop with a metaphysics of the lesbian body.”

Moyer’s work has been the subject of numerous one-person and two-person presentations, including Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times, Portland Museum of Art, ME (2020), traveled to Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2021); Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2013), traveled to Canzani Center Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, OH (2014), and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2014); and Carrie Moyer: Interstellar, Worcester Art Museum, MA (2012), among others. Moyer has participated in many group exhibitions, including Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York, NY (2023), traveling to Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA (2024), and Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2025); Inherent Structures, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2018); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Agitprop!, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015), and others. The artist’s works are represented in public collections, including the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including National Academician, National Academy of Design (2019); Guggenheim Fellowship (2013); Anonymous Was A Woman (2009), and others. Moyer is a Professor and the Co-Director of the graduate studio program at Hunter College in New York. She is also on the Board of Governors at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

I was honored to ask Carrie about her motivation to create, the similarities between writing and creating art, her latest exhibition, and so much more. 

UZOMAH: When working with photographer Sue Schaffner on Dyke Action Machine! for over seventeen years, was the plan to extend the project for so long, or was it a matter of the art taking over and letting decide the outcome?

CARRIE: We never planned on making DAM! into a long-term project. When we started, we weren’t thinking that far ahead. Most collaborations, art or activist, tend to be short-lived. We attribute our staying power to a few things. Because we were only two people and our projects were so labor-intensive, we could only do one or two a year. Also, DAM! was part of a wave of queer agitprop that began appearing in the mid-1990s. Our work was getting attention. 

U: How do you harness the transformative power of art to intersect sexuality and feminism?

C: I have been an artist for as long as I’ve been a lesbian and a feminist. In other words, my entire life! I grew up on the west coast, and from an early age, I was aware that New York City was where all the queer artists were. I landed here in 1980, a time when the art world demonstrated very little interest in artists who weren’t white and male. I’ve had a front-row seat to the art world’s attempts to open itself to the larger world. There’s still work to be done.

U: As a professor and director of the graduate program, what is the most vital thing a student of the arts can gain from a degree? What is the most essential thing a professor of the arts can teach a student, whether they seek to be a working artist or arts professional?

C: Getting an MFA is about creating a context for your work and building a sustainable, durable studio practice. Visual art has a very rich history and language all its own, one that most people are never exposed to. School feeds the development of a young artist’s work — conceptually, formally and materially. It provides students the opportunity to try out their ideas on an audience of peers and faculty who are engaged with the same language. It prepares students for the rigors and (yes) monotony of the studio. In the classroom, I’m passing on tons of essential information every day. Ultimately, what a student hears depends on what they need. I’m old-fashioned – anyone who wants to become an artist needs curiosity, discipline, fortitude and patience.

Crying - Waiting - Hoping, 2024 Signed, titled, and dated on verso Acrylic, fiber paste, pumice, and bronze powder on canvas 78 x 96 in (198.1 x 243.8 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2024 Carrie Moyer

U: Can art play a significant role in shaping a positive body image and influencing societal perceptions of women?

C: Honestly, after being an artist for 30+ years, I don’t know if art has the power to shape anyone’s body image. We still live in a 24-7 world of mediated images. Making art can certainly be empowering. Look at how many young women artists are dealing with the body and sexuality in their work, both representationally and abstractly. At the same time, the sexual body has also become the expected subject for those same artists. I’m most interested in how the so-called canon will change as a wide range of subjectivities is “allowed in.” My experience with Dyke Action Machine! has taught me that some perceptions are slow to change.

U: In what way are the visual arts similar to the literary arts?

C: I see writing and artmaking as two very different things. For most of us, our brains first go straight to text, then we slow down and look. That’s why the labels in museums get longer and longer. The best visual art is extremely specific. While words can be direct, more often, they circle the subject.

Installation view: Carrie Moyer: Timber!, Alexander Gray Associates, New York, 2024. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

U: Your current exhibition, Timber!, is viewed through an abstract lens provoked by social and environmental instability. Why is this theme so crucial in your work?

C: The exclamation, “Timber!” is best imagined in a speech bubble in a comic strip; it’s meant to call our attention to what surrounds us. The world has been so chaotic and unpredictable in recent years that it feels like, collectively, we’re holding our breath, waiting for another shoe to drop. The certainties of a functional government or a healthy planet, pillars of a shared reality, no longer hold. I wanted to make a group of paintings that dealt with the feelings of dread and awe. Easily legible symbols, such as tears, flags, waves, masts, fingers and other body parts, are embedded in great swaths of poured color and passages of magna, pumice, glitter and sand.

U: Your artwork is often seen from a feminist socio-political perspective; what motivates this aspect of your work?

C: When I was a student, abstraction was considered “neutral.” In other words, its conditions and strategies were universal, not individual. The artist’s identity or history was not discussed in relation to their work. By then the radical tactics of Painting Degree Zero were completely passe, yet were still held as an intellectual marker. Painters in the 70s and 80s began to make abstract art based on their own relationships to and/or exclusion from art movements and ideas. The best abstract painters in my generation are women because they were forced to approach Abstraction (with a capital A) from an oblique angle.

Tears on My Pillow, 2024 Signed, titled, and dated on verso Acrylic, pumice, black magnum, glitter, and graphite powder on canvas
72 x 50 in (182.9 x 127 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2024 Carrie Moyer

U: Can you walk through a typical day in the studio or when you are writing? Do you have a routine?

C: During the school year, I’m in the studio by 11 am. I need to ease myself into the workday, which means sitting in the armchair, drinking a few cups of coffee, and checking email and the news. I tend to be obsessive and overwork things, so I always have multiple paintings going at any one time. When I’m tempted to get too granular, I’ll move on to another picture. This means there are paintings and works on paper in different states of finish all over the studio. I listen to audiobooks while I work, mostly novels and mysteries. The narrator babysits my judgmental mind so the rest of my body can just go with the flow.  The truth is that I work best at night, so if I’m not teaching, my studio hours are more like 5 pm until 3 am. 

U: Being a multi-disciplined artist, what medium can you select that best explains your artistic statement and why?

C:  For me, painting is the most delicious, malleable, and expressive medium because it appeals to the intellect and emotions through the senses. My paintings are big containers for ideas, constructed for optical and visceral pleasure.

For more information about Carrie’s most recent exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, please visit their website here. You can find the feature here where the magazine has showcased the exhibition.