Carrie Moyer

Carrie Moyer (born 1960) is an American painter and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Moyer's paintings and public art projects have been exhibited both in the US and Europe since the early 1990s, and she is best known for her 17-year agitprop project, Dyke Action Machine! with photographer Sue Schaffner. Moyer's work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Tang Museum, and is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She serves as the director of the graduate MFA program at Hunter College, and has contributed writing to anthologies and publications like The Brooklyn Rail and Artforum.

Early life and education Carrie Moyer was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. She was exposed to art at an early age and frequently visited the Detroit Institute of Arts with her mother. In 1969, her family moved to the Pacific Northwest and lived in Oregon, California, and Washington throughout the 1970s. Moyer became interested in modern dance and choreographers such as Martha Graham as a child and briefly attended Bennington College on a dance scholarship until a serious car accident forced her to quit. After one year at Bennington, she dropped out and moved to New York City with her girlfriend, and took classes at the Art Students League while working at Barnes & Noble.

Moyer transferred to Pratt Institute and graduated with her BFA in painting in 1985. While at Pratt, Moyer studied under artists Rudolf Baranik, Amy and Jenny Snider, Phoebe Helman, Jack Sonnenberg, and Ernest Benkert. She largely produced abstract paintings during this time, and was inspired by painters such as Lee Krasner, Bill Jensen, Elizabeth Murray, and Katherine Porter. She also worked as an intern for Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics as an undergraduate.

In 1990, she received her MA in Computer Graphics from the New York Institute of Technology and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2001.

Career

Graphic design Example of agitprop posters by Queer Nation, located in Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C. in 2018. After graduating from Pratt in 1985, Moyer worked as a graphic designer for various advertising agencies, where she first developed skills with computer graphic software like Photoshop. Moyer began creating agitprop in the early 1990s, studying historical movements like Constructivism and Situationism and artists like Ad Reinhardt. Some founding members of the Lesbian Avengers, such as Sarah Schulman, criticized the commodification of the movement, and the shirt was ultimately discontinued. DAM! would launch artistic campaigns in which Moyer and Schaffner would wheat-paste roughly 5,000 posters featuring lesbian imagery in diverse, highly trafficked neighborhoods, with the goal of dissecting and critiquing mainstream and commercial culture. Moyer and Schaffner produced over 15 projects during their collaboration as DAM!, which came to an end in 2008 after 17 years.

In 2004, her work appeared in a group exhibition at Aljira: A Center for Contemporary Art alongside Ellen Harvey, Chris Bors, and Richard Silberman.

Moyer has taught at the Cooper Union, Rhode Island School of Design, Rutgers University, Tyler School of Art, Pratt Institute, and Yale School of Art. In 2011 and 2013, she received a MacDowell Fellowship. In 2013, Moyer received a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting, which allowed her to complete the work for a solo exhibition, "Pirate Jenny", which was shown at the Tang Museum, Columbus College of Art and Design, and Savannah College of Art and Design. A piece from the show is also held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also had a solo exhibition, "Interstellar," at the Worcester Art Museum in 2012, In October 2019, Moyer was elected as a full member of the National Academy of Design.

Writing Moyer's writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Modern Painters, the Brooklyn Rail and other publications. Complex and seductive paintings layer vividly colored and textured biomorphic forms with a range of historical, stylistic and physical references that include Color Field, Social Realist, and Surrealist paintings, 1960s and ’70s counter culture graphics, 1970s feminist art, and bodily forms and fluids. Moyer often works on the floor, pouring, rolling, stippling, mopping, and hand-working the paint, as well as adding sections of glitter.

Critic Martha Schwendener has written about Moyer's paintings: "Painting is a neurotically self-conscious medium—it's always looking over its shoulder, responding to earlier eras and earlier ideas. Carrie Moyer puts that self-consciousness at the center of her work. But where mash-ups of different periods and styles have become popular with post-postmodern painters (and often end up looking like conceptual train wrecks), her canvases are cool, seamless—almost alchemical."

By juxtaposing the ancient, modern, and contemporary, Moyer rips images out of their old contexts and circulates them in a new one—"cross-wiring," she calls it. Slipping between abstract and representational, the raw canvases are built up with strata of translucent and opaque color, positive and negative shapes, and solids and silhouettes that reference different historical periods: ancient fertility figures with bulging hips; vases with breasts circling their perimeters; murky blobs that recall the paintings of biomorphic Surrealism. These juxtapositions make a commentary on an unsettling subtext here, a suggestion of the way women have served as talismanic muse-objects in past art instead of intelligent innovators.

Personal life In 1995, Moyer met artist Sheila Pepe at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Since 2018, she has worked out of a studio in the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park.

Awards

1999: Elaine de Kooning Memorial Fellowship 1999: Peter Norton Family Foundation Project Grant 2000: Creative Capital Award 2009: Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant 2009: Anonymous Was A Woman Award 2011: Yaddo Residency 2011 and 2013: MacDowell Fellowship 2013: Guggenheim Fellowship

Selected writings "Carrie Moyer." Grabner, Michelle and Mary Jane Jacobs, eds. The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2010 Moyer, Carrie. "So Appealing, So Different: Carrie Moyer on the Women of Pop," Artforum, April 2010 Moyer, Carrie. "Alina Szapocznikow: My American Dream," The Brooklyn Rail, October 2010 Moyer, Carrie. "Maria Lassnig: The Pitiless Eye," Art in America, January 2009 Moyer, Carrie. "Dona Nelson: Brain Stain," The Brooklyn Rail, October 2006