Opener 24
Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny

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, Social Realist, and Surrealist paintings, 1960s and ’70s 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, as well as adding sections of glitter.

A painter, designer, and writer, Moyer was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960. In 1985, she received her BFA in painting from Pratt Institute in New York, where she continues to live and work. After graduating, Moyer fueled her energy into activism, creating agitprop for groups such as ACT UP, Queer Nation, and DYKE ACTION MACHINE! (DAM!), which she co-founded with Sue Schaffner in 1991. Through her participation in these activist communities, Moyer began studying the history of graphics and visual propaganda, and earned her MA in Computer Graphic Design from the New York Institute of Technology in 1990.