Artist Donald Moffett @ CMCA Rockland, Maine - Center for Maine Contemporary Art - "Donald Moffett: Nature Cult, Seeded" Exhibition

DONALD MOFFETT 

NATURE CULT, SEEDED 

Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland 

May 25 - September 8, 2024 

DONALD MOFFETT 

Lot 110123 (nature cult, houses), 2023 

Wood, acrylic, steel 

56 1⁄4 x 43 1⁄2 x 36 inches 

© Donald Moffett, courtesy CMCA 

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockland, Maine, presents the exhibition DONALD MOFFETT: NATURE CULT, SEEDED. The show, curated by former CMCA director and chief curator Suzette McAvoy, is the artist’s first exhibition in Maine, where he is a seasonal resident of North Haven Island. 

Donald Moffett (b. 1955, San Antonio, TX) emerged as both an artist and activist in the late 1980s, participating in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), as a founding member of the collective Gran Fury, and as a founding partner of BUREAU, a trans-disciplinary studio. Taking abstraction and the monochrome as evolving unfinished languages, Moffett challenges the traditional flat frame of painting through non-traditional techniques and employs new forms that serve as carriers of both personal and political meaning. Currently, Moffett is pursuing NATURE CULT, a deep study and expanding practice of how art and the environmental crisis might collide. “The intensity of a cult is called for as we turn our attention to nature and its preservation,” says the artist.

NATURE CULT, SEEDED is the latest iteration in the ongoing series. The exhibition is centered on the large-scale sculptural installation, Lot 030323/24 (the golden bough), an assemblage of dead tree limbs painted gold and bolted together to form an undead yet ethereal totem to life. In a recent interview with fellow North Haven resident architect Toshiko Mori in Domus magazine, Moffett speaks of his interest in “the tree, the fundamental unit of a forest and the web of ecology that builds out from the tree. When you mess with the tree, a system can fall apart.”

Other works in the exhibition are new wall-mounted and freestanding sculptures incorporating the form of weathered birdhouses punctured and perforated and painted in intense hues. Also included is a selection of the artist’s emblematic shaped and carved panel paintings finished in luminous epoxy resin or given a lush pelt of extruded paint, referencing various organic and bodily forms. Throughout the exhibition, the haunting sound of the now-extinct male Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird can be heard calling for a mate that will never come. At once ominous and seductive, DONALD MOFFETT: NATURE CULT, SEEDED is a clarion call to the precariousness of our planet in crisis. “I don’t think there are issues more important than nature and its health,” says the artist.

DONALD MOFFETT 

Donald Moffett’s diverse and formally innovative practice includes painting, sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, prints, and video. His work is included in over thirty public collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, among others. Moffett has had solo exhibitions across the United States and internationally, including a major survey exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX, which traveled to the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA.

His work has been included in important group shows such as Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York, NY; America is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and ICA Collection: Expanding the Field of Painting at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA. In 2022, his work was featured in the exhibition DONALD MOFFETT + NATURE CULT + THE McNAY at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. Moffett is a member of the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, and New York, NY, and the National Leadership Council of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, TX. He is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY, and Aspen, CO, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA. Donald Moffett divides his time between Maine, Texas, and New York City.

CMCA - Center for Maine Contemporary Art

21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841

cmcanow.org

Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking at UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

February 6 - April 2, 2000

The exhibition "Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking," organized by artist Julie Ault, presents a dynamic visual dialogue between two artists of different generations. Both Sister Corita Kent and Donald Moffett have engaged bold graphic design and montage techniques to form compositions that communicate their ideas and social convictions.

For Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986), later known simply as Corita, distribution as a populist principle was key in determining her medium of expression. She learned printmaking in order to reproduce affordable images in large volume. Hailed the "modern nun" on the cover of "Newsweek" Magazine in 1966, Sister Corita embraced the new freedoms engendered by the Vatican Council II in her art and in her capacity as teacher and chair of the art department at the Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Using her art as a platform in the 1960s, Sister Corita Kent turned her attention to issues ranging from conflicts between radical and conservative positions in the Catholic Church; advertising and market culture; U.S. imperialism abroad in Vietnam; and racism at home. By 1969, suffering from frequent censure from local Church officials, among other factors, she left the order and her religious community and moved to Boston, Massachusetts. Her serigraphs included in "Power Up" span the 1960s and include examples from the Grunwald Center's extensive collection of serigraphs bequeathed to the Center by Corita herself.

As artist, designer and activist, Donald Moffett (b.1955) has broadly contributed to the gay liberation and AIDS-activist movements. Moffett's art is conceptually driven and includes photographs, paintings, sculpture, postcards and posters. A member of the collective "Gran Fury" from 1987-1993, Moffett worked individually and collaboratively on graphic campaigns designed to communicate the seriousness of the AIDS crisis. Moffett made a series of images in the form of disarmingly simple photo-text montages for the "Age of AIDS" column in "The Village Voice," a New York weekly newspaper. These temporal pieces relied on metaphor and expressed commentary in visual shorthand form, often with complex implications and wicked humor. These works are featured in "Power Up," alongside Moffett's mixed media works addressing public morality as interpreted and legislated by conservative religious and political institutions. The serigraphs of Sister Corita Kent and the mixed-media works of New York-based Moffett are juxtaposed in "Power Up" to show both artists and their works in a new context.

Beginning with her work with "Group Material" (1979-1996), a collective which organized exhibitions and public projects that explored interrelationships between politics and aesthetics, Julie Ault takes on the role of curator as part of her artistic practice. Julie Ault has said "I view an exhibition akin to an artwork in which every conceptual and concrete aspect requires attention and involves choice, not convention. An exhibition is not simply a frame for presenting artworks or artifacts; from its overall structure to its every detail an exhibition is content itself."

Julie Ault's lively exhibition design for "Power Up" derives from the formal features and aesthetic strategies of Corita's and Moffett's artworks. Ault's installation of "Power Up" includes the construction of displays and seating, overlaid in news articles or quotations to illustrate the context in which the artists created their work. Ault's exhibition deepens the rich legacy and interplay of art, design and social relevance.

Also on view in the exhibition are Baylis Glascock's film "Corita Kent: On Teaching and Celebration" and "Target City Hall," a video produced by DIVA TV in 1989 about one demonstration organized by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP).

The "Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking" exhibition is an expanded version of a project Ault originally organized for the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1997.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu