Moore, Sabra

“I am a Texas-born artist living in Abiquiu, New Mexico. My work is based on re-interpreting family, social, and natural history through the form of artist’s books, sewn and constructed sculptures and paintings, and installations. My work is a kind of personal archaeology; I see myself as a literate granddaughter who has synthesized the quilt making and storytelling traditions of my rural grandmothers into new forms. I have exhibited extensively in New York City, Canada, Brazil and New Mexico. I also lived for two years in Guinea, West Africa working as a teacher in the Peace Corps. I am committed to the idea of placing artwork within a social context and have worked with feminist/political art groups towards that end. I resided many years in New York City and was a long-time activist in the women’s art movement. I was a member of the Heresies Collective, a feminist journal on art and politics and was formerly President of NYC/Women’s Caucus for Art. I also worked with the art collective RepoHistory. I have organized several large-scale women’s collaborative exhibits, including Reconstruction Project, based on a Mayan codex and Connections Project/ Conexus, a collaboration between artists in Brazil and the United States. The artists’ books created for those exhibits were included in the Museum of Modern Art exhibit, Committed to Print. My artist’s books have been called minimalist novels; they are in many museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (NYC). I now reside in New Mexico, and have hand-built a straw bale studio and adobe house with fellow artist Roger Mignon. I recently curated The Farm Show (Bond House, Espanola), a collaboration between artists and farmers featuring the family stories of twenty area growers; I have also made artist’s books and yearly postcards with farmers at the Espanola Farmers’ Market. My current work is in the form of boats, cages, leaves or poles, and relates to issues of water and trees. This winter, I had a solo exhibition, Out of the Woods, at the Harwood Museum Art in Taos.”

Episode:
Sabra Moore, Jafagirls, This is My Denver, Randell Henry