Openings: A Memoir by Sabra Moore from the NYC Women’s Art Movement (Guinea)

Openings is a memoir from the women’s art movement in New York City, from 1970 to 1992. It was written by Sabra Moore (Guinea 1964-66). After her Peace Corps tour, Sabra moved to New York City and became involved with the feminist art movement. She was president of the NYC/Women’s Caucus for Art, a key organizer of the 1984 demonstration against MoMA for excluding women and minority artists, a member of the Heresies Collective, an active member of Women Artists in Revolution and Women’s Action Coalition, and a leading organizer/creator of several large-scale women’s exhibitions in New York City, Brazil, Canada, and New Mexico. Her artistic and political involvement was showcased in the feature length film The Heretics (2011). Moore also worked for thirty years in NYC as a freelance photo editor for publishers such as Doubleday, Harper Collins, American Heritage, and Random House. Her most recent major solo show, Out of the Woods, was at the Harwood Museum in Taos (2007). Moore authored and illustrated the trade book Petroglyphs: Ancient Language/ Sacred Art (1997), and her artist’s books can be found in several museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Leaving Brooklyn in 1996, she now lives in Abiquiú, New Mexico.

The book features Moore’s involvement in pivotal art organizations of this time and her own development as an artist, counterbalanced with her connections to family in rural East Texas and friends in New Mexico. Openings is illustrated throughout by a treasure of 950 color and black & white images of the art from this momentous period—a valuable collection that is concurrently being archived by Barnard College along with papers, letters, show cards, posters, original artworks, and other documents.

Sabra in Ibadan 1965

According to the publisher, “This abundantly illustrated personal narrative takes readers through twenty-two years of activism in the women’s art movements in New York City during a period of great cultural change. Author Sabra Moore vividly recounts life in this era of social upheaval in which women artists responded to war, racial tension and reconciliation, cultural and aesthetic inequality, and struggles for reproductive freedom. We learn intimately how she and fellow women artists found ways to create politically and personally effective art works, exhibitions, actions, and institutions.”

Openings: A Memoir from the Women’s Art Movement, New York City 1970-1992 is published by newvillagepress, a not-for-profit publishing division of Architects Designers Planners for Social Responsibility.

www.newvillagepress.net