This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born June 22, 1953 in New York City, Pop-Surrealist painter Frank Moore, ill for twenty years with HIV, died of AIDS there April 21, 2002. He was also a filmmaker and writer on art and culture. Moore attended the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine, 1970; received his B.A. degree from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1971-75, where he was Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Scholar of the House in Painting. In 1973, he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine. In 1977-79, Moore held a residency at Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, as he did in 1988 at the Sundance Institute.
Moore's paintings explore the effects and ramifications of his disease, his difficulties in obtaining treatment, his fear, sense of loss and anger at what he often saw as the corrupt ways of the medical establishment and the world. A social activist in the political struggle over AIDS, Moore was active in the Act Up organization.
Moore often paints landscape panoramas, expected in the out-of-doors, surprising in interiors. His "Oz," 72 x 120, 1999-2000, features pyramidal forms succinctly placed in a barren landscape, most composed of piles of the detritus and debris of modern lifetipped and broken houses, stoves, bathtubs, armoires, automobiles and above-ground swimming pools that speak of the goods we acquire in our attempts to live our lives in a materialistic society. The contrasting pyramid of a teepee, near a huge, life-affirming sunflower stalk that dwarfs the other objects as it exits the top of the painting, represents what the artist seems to consider a more natural, wholesome philosophy and life-style opposed to the trash piles of urban existence.
An obvious "interior landscape" is "Lullaby," 50 x 65, 1997, where a small herd of tiny buffalo exist, in unlikely fashion, on a large, pristine white bed with gleaming pillows, which may refer to the artist's experience being hospitalized by his disease. Less obvious, is "Arena," 61 x 72, 1992, where walls in concentric circles like a labyrinth, hospital operating theater or chamber of government is populated with skeletons of man and beast. Small humans play their infinitesimal roles in a drama that does, indeed, feature a central, dying patient on a hospital bed with his spirit departing from him as if a white puff of steam or smoke.
Moore often painted gouache studies for his detailed oils, as well as employing the silkscreen process to apply random snowflakes, as in "Lullaby."
He received many awards in the 1980s:
1983 New York State Council on the Arts, film production grant
1985 New York Dance and Performance Award
The Beards Fund, film production grant
National Endowment for the Arts, Dance/Film/Video grant for film post-production
1986 National Endowment for the Arts, Interarts grant
The Walter Foundation, film production grant
Con Edison, performance grant
1987 National Endowment for the Arts, Dance/Film/Video grant for film production
New York State Council on the Arts, film production grant
ONE-MAN EXHIBITIONS:
1983
"The Birds and the Bees," The Clocktower, New York
1984
"Recent Paintings," Christminster Gallery, New York
1985
"Drawings for the Theater," Abbaye Royale a Fontevraud, France
1988
"Recent Paintings," Paula Allen Gallery, New York
1989
"Recent Paintings," Paula Allen Gallery, New York
1990
"Recent Paintings," Paula Allen Gallery, New York
1993
Sperone Westwater, New York, 9 - 30 January
1995
Sperone Westwater, New York, 25 March - 22 April
1996
"Nature/Culture and the postmodern Sublime," Bard College,
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 13-28 April
Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome, November-December
1998
Sperone Westwater, New York, 28 March-25 April
2002-03
"Frank Moore, Green Thumb in a Dark Eden," Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
From:
Faye Hirsch, Art in America, May 2003
http://www.speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/artists/bio.html?record=13
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Described as "one of the most compelling painters to deal with the AIDS crisis as well as environmental issues" ("Art in America, 10/98), Frank Moore was both realist and surrealist, and his themes are never far from sorrow and menacing danger. In fall, 1998, he had an exhibition in New York City at the Sperone Westwater Gallery.
He died on April 21, 2002 of AIDS, having devoted much of his work to health and environmental subjects. |
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