CARRIE MOYER

Early life and background

Carrie Moyer was born in Detroit and later moved to New York, where she lives and works in Brooklyn. She studied at Pratt Institute (BFA), received an MA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, grounding her practice in both painting and design.

In the 1980s she worked as a graphic designer while becoming active in lesbian and gay rights movements, using her design skills in queer and AIDS activism. In 1991 she co-founded the public art project Dyke Action Machine! with photographer Sue Schaffner, one of the first long-running lesbian agitprop initiatives in New York City.

Carrie Moyer Artworks

Carrie Moyer’s artworks reimagine American abstraction through lush colour, poured acrylics, glitter, and graphic forms that often suggest bodies, landscapes, or cosmic space without settling into fixed representation. Her paintings draw on Color Field, Surrealism, Pop, 1960s and 1970s counterculture graphics, and feminist art, while centring queer and feminist perspectives.

Titles, surfaces, and process

Moyer often works on the floor, pouring, rolling, mopping, and stippling acrylic paint, then building up strata of translucent and opaque colour that oscillate between flatness and illusory depth. Her witty, allusive titles and use of glitter, saturated colour, and biomorphic forms speak to ‘the pleasure and precarity of the moment’, connecting sensory experience with social and environmental instability.

Queer feminist abstraction

Since the 1990s, Moyer has developed complex, layered canvases in which translucent pours, hard-edged shapes, and sparkling surfaces ‘cross-wire’ historical references, from ancient fertility figures to modernist abstraction. Works such as Pirate Jenny at The Metropolitan Museum of Art exemplify how she reclaims modernist devices—like Frankenthaler-style pours and geometric framing—for radical feminist and queer ends.

Dyke Action Machine! and agitprop

Alongside her studio work, Moyer’s agitprop practice with Dyke Action Machine! appropriated advertising and mass-media strategies to address lesbian visibility and queer politics in public space. For Moyer, the posters and the paintings share a declarative, public-facing voice, melding twentieth-century abstraction and political graphics with the lived experience of the lesbian body.

Select Awards and Accolades

• Guggenheim Fellowship (John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation)
• Joan Mitchell Foundation award
• Anonymous Was a Woman award
• Creative Capital Foundation support among other grants and honours

Moyer has also been included in the Whitney Biennial (2017), further cementing her position within contemporary American painting.

Carrie Moyer Exhibitions

Carrie Moyer has been the subject of significant solo exhibitions in museums and galleries, and her work features in important group exhibitions exploring abstraction, feminism, and queer art. Her work has been presented in the United States and Europe since the early 1990s, and she is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York as well as exhibiting with Alexander Gray Associates and Pilar Corrias.

Select solo exhibitions

• ‘Timber!’, Alexander Gray Associates, New York (2024)
• ’Always Venus, Never Mars’, Pilar Corrias, London (2020)
• ‘Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times’, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (two-person, often treated as a major survey of both artists, 2020–22)
• ‘Carrie Moyer: Interstellar’, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts (2012)
• ‘Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny’, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs; travelled to other venues (c. 2013 touring exhibition)

Select group exhibitions

• Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017)
• Always, Always, Others, and other major abstraction surveys at institutions including the Hessel Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design, exploring queer and feminist abstraction

To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Carrie Moyer, follow her on Ocula.

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Ocula | 2026