Carrie Moyer

Carrie Moyer is a painter and writer who has shown her work in the U.S. and Europe since 1993. She has been the subject of sixteen solo exhibitions and participated in over 110 group shows. Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny, a solo exhibition of new paintings, opened at Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in January 2013. Selected venues include PS1/MoMA; the Worcester Museum; Palm Beach ICA; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; the Weatherspoon, Cooper-Hewitt, and Hessel Museums; Shedhalle (Zurich); Le Magasin (Grenoble); and the Project Arts Centre (Dublin).

Moyer grew up in the Pacific Northwest and studied at Pratt Institute (B.F.A.), New York Institute of Technology (M.A.) and Bard College (M.F.A.). Grants and honors include Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2009); Anonymous Was a Woman (2009); New York Council on the Arts (2001); Creative Capital (2000); Peter Norton Family Foundation (1999); and Art Matters (1994), among others. Moyer has been a resident artist at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she serves on the Board of Governors. She is an Associate Professor in the Art Department at Hunter College.

For the past decade, Moyer’s writing has appeared in publications such as Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, and Modern Painters. Recent projects include a catalog essay on Nancy Grossman and texts on Louise Fishman, Stephen Mueller, Alina Szapocznikow, and Maria Lassnig. In addition to an active painting and writing career, Moyer and photographer Sue Schaffner co-founded  Dyke Action Machine!, one of the first queer interventionist art projects. The project ran from 1991 to 2008.

From an introduction to Pirate Jenny, the 2013 solo exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum:

For the past two decades, Carrie Moyer’s paintings have boldly merged political imagery, abstraction, and unapologetic visual pleasure. Complex and seductive, her paintings layer overlapping, biomorphic forms, vibrant colors, and a diversity of textures. They are also richly loaded with a range of historical, stylistic, and physical references that include Color Field and Surrealist paintings, 1960s counter culture graphics, 1970s feminist art, and bodily forms and fluids. Exploring the full capabilities of acrylic paint—what she calls the ugly step-child of oil paint—Moyer often works on the floor, pouring, rolling, stippling, mopping, and hand-working the paint, and even embellishing it with glitter and graphite.

Follow this link to view a recent studio visit with the artist.

Profile photograph by Sheila Pope.