Frank Moore

Born 1953, New York, United States
Died 2002, New York, United States

Museum of Contemporary Art

Lullaby, 1997
oil on canvas on featherboard with red pine frame

Collection of Mike Meagher and Daniel Romualdez. Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from Terra Foundation for American Art. Courtesy of the Gesso Foundation, New York © The Gesso Foundation/ Frank Moore Estate, New York.

Ernest Hemingway once suggested that each person dies twice, once when they pass away and again when the last person to remember them forgets. However, if someone is forgotten before they die, then it might feel as if they never existed. This was the reality for those who lived through the AIDS crisis. For years, as people became sick and died, America’s gay community was ignored by the media and government.

Painter and activist Frank Moore, who at 48 died with HIV/AIDS, created Lullaby by transforming his own sick bed into a whimsical landscape populated by a herd of buffalo. Given US President Ronald Reagan did not so much as utter the word AIDS until four years into the crisis, Moore suspected that his community, much like the endangered buffalo, was being left to become extinct. Drawing parallels between the AIDS epidemic and burgeoning ecological crises, Moore believed that this was an apocalypse for himself and those he loved.

A painter and AIDS activist, Frank Moore’s (1953–2002) works are elaborate worlds in which the body and the natural environment are vividly inscribed within one other. Often adorned in elaborate frames—sometimes found, sometimes repurposed, and sometimes assembled by the artist—Moore’s “anti-gardens,” as he called his imagery, evoke the political, social, spiritual, and ecological contradictions at the heart of modern life. As the artist once said: “You cannot have healthy people in an unhealthy environment, and you can’t have a healthy environment where unhealthy—greedy, exploitative—people predominate.”

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.