Visiting Artist Series: Ayanah Moor and Darby English
Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History and Director of the Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago. He is also associate faculty in the University’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.
His scholarship focuses on ways that fine art and popular culture produced since 1964 have prepared us to welcome—or reject—the passing of difference as we have known it. English is author or coeditor of six books, including three monographs: To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror (Yale, 2019), 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (University of Chicago, 2016), and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT, 2007).
Ayanah Moor (b 1973, Norfolk, VA) is an artist living and working in Chicago. Through her paintings, prints, drawings and performance, Moor operates within a visual field where notions of blackness and gender identity take shape. She utilizes existing material and cultural artifacts to generate alternative histories, often repositioning the subject as a corrective gesture or to create counter narratives. Vintage advertisements, athletic competition, reimagined slogans, and healing practices have fueled recent projects. Her work engages subversive and demonstrative displays of blackness that locate love, fear, myth and desire.
Moor received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Her exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the DePaul Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives—USC Libraries; Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles; Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Auckland; and Proyecto ‘ace, Buenos Aires.