Drawing While Black Mixtape Vol 1
Drawing While Black Mixtape Vol 1
Winner of our 2022 Amsterdam Open Book Prize, Maurice Moore’s Drawing While Black Mixtape Vol 1 is a text composed of visual poems that explore various types of quare mark-making. Mark-making dat allows Blk nonbinary people such as Moore the space and freedom to push further and engage wit balancing and negotiating the joys & pains Black performers experience both inside and outside African and African American Diasporas as creatives. De tracks were created by incorporating elements of performance-drawing to create immersive environments and engaging experiences relating to race, gender identity, and gender expression, coupled with black hxstories and cultural diasporic traditions in Amerikkka.
As the work evolved, Moore continued to consider what digital, analog, and ephemeral marks do if we let them be themselves. The many, many, many marks in these works were created by engaging wit Beautiful Black Blackty Blk figures of all shapes and sizes in the Black and Queer diaspora. Next, Moore decided to put their foot in it, and infuse the work with African American Vernacular/Gesture English (AAVE) and image/visual/gestural descriptions, thereby further expanding queer mark-making.
They are drawing with vocabularies, sources, bibliographies, scripts, and image descriptions; remixing past drawings; collaging visuals and texts; and incorporating queer Black theory to create these new experimental marks.
Beautifully irreverent
—Raina Léon
Maurice Moore is an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They received a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Performance Studies from the University of California-Davis, and a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Their works have appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Decoded Pride, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and at the Poetry Foundation. From 2011 to the present, the creative has exhibited at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD) in London, United Kingdom; Calabar Gallery in New York, New York; Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis, California; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina.
In the period of Beyoncé's Renaissance, the cutthrough couture of Pose in the cultural divinity of NYC ball, and the delicious audacity of black queerness across texts, music, film, art, and more, Drawing While Black emerges. We are invited into a distinctive lexicon of black, queer resistance in visual art and poetry. That page is pulsing with music, from the table of contents to defiant insistence on making one's own light. Moore balances their ink on paper highly gestural inserts as a full and "thicc thicc thicc" celebration of blackness against the field of white. The poems, fierce and fearless, intermingle pop culture, philosophy, and body positivity with revelatory moments of invitation into the artistic process in shaping meaning and the world. This collection is tongue pops, linguistically playful, beautifully irreverent to structural preservations of white heteronormativity and yet deeply reverent of the body and the figure. If you put this book down, really, what are you doing with your life?
—Raina Léon, poet and judge of the Amsterdam Open Book Prize 2022
The vacillation between text and image in Maurice Moore's work draws a landscape that is both lyrical and percussive. Gestures, marks, bodies, and exclamations harmonize expanding the definition of what drawing is. They choreograph fragments from black history, queer identity, African American Vernacular, and personal experience. Moore’s visual poetry is a fierce celebration of drawing while black.
—Mary Laube, artist and Associate Professor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville
