Disco by Maurice Moore

“Disco”, 2020, 9” x 12”, Ink on paper- SOLD

The “Bad Paper” series was a questioning of the role materials play, and the figures being rendered in an artist’s process. Lastly, I am attempting a meshing of the texted-based works with visual works into the realm of speculative fiction(s). In an attempt to sample and/or remix these works by applying my research from Black Music, Performance Studies, African and African American Diaspora Studies, and Queer of Color critique to start creating hybrid pieces.  Why is the default for artist materials i.e. the paper(s), or surfaces available to Black, Indigenous, Queer, and People of Color (BIQPOC)’s creatives White, Fair, Pale, Milky, Pink, Light, Beige etc.? Why don’t these so-called standard materials match and/or reflect most of our skin tones?  Why were/are most of bodies used rendered during formal training not Black and/or Brown, or disabled, or trans, etc.? What or how does not rendering Black, Indigenous, Queer, and People of Color (BIQPOC)’s in our diverse states of being negatively contribute to erasure and/or violence BIQPOC’s experience in western art?

Maurice Moore is currently a doctoral Performance Studies student at the University of California-Davis. He recently completed his Master’s in African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the spring of 2018. From 2011 to 2020, he has exhibited work and performed at the International House Davis (I-House) in Davis California, Christina Ray Gallery in Soho New York, the Lee Hansley Gallery in Raleigh North Carolina, the Greenville Museum of Art in Greenville North Carolina, the Gallery 307 + Orbit Galleries in Georgia Athens, and worked with Rios/Miralda for the Garbage Celebration performance in Madison Wisconsin. His upcoming fictional works will appear in Rigorous, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, Strukturriss Quarterly Journal, and HIVES Buzz-Zine between winter 2020 and spring 2021. Moore also has a couple of creative non-fiction essays published in Unlikely Stories Mark V and Confluence.