And, then of course, we had to deal with the pragmatic realities of shipping, costs, and permissions, etc.” The most significant addition, she said, was the archival material, which “helped shape the texture and the personal tenor of the show.” Harris started with the exhibition template that Klaus Kertess had begun and “simply added, subtracted and refined the check list.
“It took us almost two years, or three graduate curatorial assistants, one per semester,” said Gumpert. Not herself a Frank Moore scholar, she enlisted Susan Harris who meticulously scoured the archival material at Fales. When Klaus Kertess’s plans for a Frank Moore exhibition fell through, according to Gumpert, David Leiber and Michael Boodro from the Gesso Foundation (Boodro was a fellow Yale student and life-long friend of Moore’s), approached Grey and Gumpert said yes. “Frank Moore was multi-faceted,” said Gumpert. Based upon nearly 44-linear feet of archival material, sketchbooks and documents (56 boxes) housed in the Frank Moore Papers at the Fales’s Downtown Collection, the show and its accompanying catalogue illuminate Moore’s serious nature, his love of research, his love of drawing and sketching, and his talent for writing. Curated by independent scholar Susan Harris with Grey Art Gallery director Lynn Gumpert, the exhibition includes 35 major paintings and over 50 gouaches, prints, and drawings. The current exhibit, Toxic Beauty: The Art of Frank Moore, up until December 8th at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Tracey/Barry Gallery in the Fales Library, spans Moore’s entire career. In his high-school yearbook (Roslyn, NY, class of 1971), the artist Frank Moore, then only 18, included a little line drawing and a self-description that began, “Failed first test in trig.” It was a candid and whimsical admission from such a deep thinker, whose career brought together his passion for nature and things green with his concern about genetically modified food, his anger over environmental degradation, and his critique of the medical establishment and the health care industry. Images courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York
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