Moor, Ayanah

American, b. 1973 Virginia

BiographyAyanah Moor created two paintings especially for the Ralph Arnold exhibition, responding directly to the style, era, and concerns of his work. In Seventy-Three, the year of her birth, Moor embeds an image from an advertisement for a hair product that she clipped from a 1973 issue of Ebony. Using the geometric, hard-edged abstraction favored by Arnold, she creates triangular patterns in richly hued colors that evoke the pan-African design identity of the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s—red, black, and green. The choice of the hair product advertisement subtly evokes questions of dominant beauty narratives in our culture and the pressure for Black women (and men) to assimilate to white beauty standards. Its shape also recalls that of a television screen, which appears so often in Arnold’s work. Like Arnold, Moor probes the links between consumer culture and race, media, and society. Moor’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Baltimore, MD; Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA; and the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA; among many others. She is an Associate Professor in the Print Media department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Listen to Ayanah Moor in conversation with Museum of Contemporary Photography Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Karen Irvine, here: http://chicagoathleticevents.com/podcast/ayanah-moor-artist-in-conversation-with-karen-irvine/