Fan Dance at the Golden Nugget

Label Text

Can the use of glitter in painting be a subversive act? For artist Carrie Moyer, it is. When Moyer returned to painting in the early 1990s after designing propaganda for lesbian and AIDS activist organizations, she found herself in a quandary: “I was secretly afraid making abstract paintings again might [be] a bit too ‘serious’ or ‘removed’ from the real world.” By incorporating glitter into her canvases—a material that is often considered over-the-top or decorative—she discovered a way to shakeup the seriousness of abstract art, and also inject queer sensibility. In doing so, Moyer disrupts the male and hetero-centric history of abstract painting.

DimensionsOverall: 78 × 66 in. (198.1 × 167.6 cm)

Accession Number 2019.14

Classificationspainting

Images (1)

Audio (1)

Audio Tour with Carrie Moyer

Audio Transcript

Carrie Moyer (American, born 1960)
Fan Dance at the Golden Nugget, 2017

Run Time: 1:29
Recorded by Carrie Moyer / June 28, 2019

Hi. I’m Carrie Moyer and I have a painting in the Des Moines Art Center collection called Fan Dance at the Golden Nugget which I made in 2017. The genesis of many of works is this feeling that I want to see something that I’ve never seen before and happily this work was included in Jared Ledesma’s Queer Abstraction exhibition in which he is sort of investigating the idea that something we think is being neutral, which is abstract art, how does that get inflected by our own experience. So in my work I’m thinking about all sorts of things from the idea of what does it feel like to live in the body of a woman, how do the signifiers of sort of flashy gay culture show up, so I have passages in the painting that are encrusted with glitter, to different gestures and nods to art history movements that have been important to my work such as color field painting, which shows up in pouring and the kind of veiling of color and then these sort of cut forms that go back to someone like Henri Matisse and early 20th century modernism.