Ayanah Moor

Ayanah Moor completed her BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA at Tyler School of Art-Temple University. She is currently Associate Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Moor has been awarded residency at Vermont Studio Center, Women’s Studio Workshop, Blue Mountain Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Recent exhibitions include: Wexner Center for the Arts, Van Brunt Gallery, Wellesley College, Duke University, The Print Center, Columbia College-Chicago, and the Erie Art Museum. Her work has been addressed in publications such as: Critical Inquiry (University of Chicago Press); Home Girls Make Some Noise: A Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (Parker Publishing); Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip Hop Generation (Cleis Press) Black Women, Gender and Families (University of Illinois Press) and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (Indiana University Press).

Ayanah Moor’s work addresses contemporary popular culture through an interrogation of individual and group identity, gender and vernacular aesthetics. In Moor’s view the everyday—subject mater from the vernacular landscape—provides ample material from which to draw, from hip hop culture and politics, to black talk and women’s football. Moor creates works that contribute to, generate and enrich the discourse surrounding visibility, invisibility, code and appropriation. Her artwork involves a process of research, experimentation, play and execution. These ideas frame the conceptual basis of Ayanah Moor’s performance, video and print-based art.

Below/Abajo: Ayanah Moor & April Martin, For Sha Rock, 2008, video.
Installation view at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, PA, 2008