Maurice Moore is an artist who makes, collages, drawings and free writing text pieces.

Moore received his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his MFA Thesis Exhibition will be installed at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in May of 2011. He was most recently awarded his first solo show at The Center for Visual Artists, which will be held in the spring of 2012. He has exhibited work at the Lee Hansley Gallery in Raleigh, Greenville Museum of Art, and the Kinston Community Council for the Arts Center. He was also awarded residences and scholarships at the Penland School of Crafts, Ox-Bow, the Herbert & Virginia H. Howard Scholarship, and the Helen Thrush Scholarship while at UNCG.

Artist Statement

My drawing subject is the human form. I focus on my own body in my large scale charcoal collage drawings and free-writing text pieces. I also work from direct observation and invention. I am actively searching for ways to express my gender identity and sexuality. With the drawing, collage and free writing, I broaden my notions of what it means to reconstruct while I simultaneously deconstruct the human form. Creating the form in public reveals how it is created. The materials and public performance further aid me in my quest to establish and maintain my identity as a gay black male. I am attempting to dissect and explore each facet of what it means to be a gay person and a person of color in the 21st century.

With this body of work I am not simply asking to be seen and accepted, I am screaming it. These drawings are not about a fixed stagnant identity, or in my case identities; this work is about passage. The drawings are about time: moments down to the seconds. For example: the monumental moments in my life range from the choice I made not to kill myself, to stop the self-mutilation, and ask for help. With my work I want to show the courage it takes to admit these shameful truths to myself as well as society, coupled with the stigmas that are indelibly attached to them. These drawings are about an identity that is fluid. Identities are plural like the flow of thought through our consciousness. The fluidity of these types of identities is borne out of a need to survive oppression.

When I draw, the tactile feeling as well as the emotional feeling must both be present in my process. From the actual charcoal in my hands as I pull it across the surface of the paper, to how it looks as the mark is being made, to the very sound of the charcoal itself, and the vibrations: all of these things are part of the experience. Upon opening myself up to these experiences, I unconsciously give myself permission to be reckless, violent and even aggressive, I get to become a sort of living drawing. I can forget everything, and just for a second get to not be the other, the outsider.