Conversation with Carrie Moyer, New York, 2003

In this conversation, Carrie Moyer explains that feminist art history was not formally taught when she attended art school, prompting her to self-educate. She developed her work from this autodidactic feminist perspective, as “there was no invented new language for what resistance could look like.” Her method involves reinserting personal and feminist content into historical models, “and hoping that something original comes out of this hybrid, where you’re inserting your concerns into this larger frame and sort of equalizing everything, making it democratic.”

Her first profound encounter with feminism came as an intern at Heresies magazine, surrounded by women deeply engaged in the movement. Shortly afterward, she came out as a lesbian and realized that “inside lesbian culture, art is not valued that much. It’s sort of seen as this bourgeois practice.” This tension pushed her to question the value of painting, until she was inspired by figures like Mira Schor, whose writings revealed how painting could function as a site of activist engagement.

Moyer notes that many students today wrestle with issues of gender and identity but remain disconnected from the lineage of feminist struggles. “And it’s almost as if none of that stuff has touched them. It’s like they don't know about the history of feminist art.” She also critiques shifts in political engagement within the art world. While political content often appears stylistically in contemporary work, she argues that this performative politics lacks the force to affect larger systems. “This notion of where art and politics collide is historically problematic for everyone,” she notes.

In her own practice, Moyer developed a dual track: making paintings for the commercial gallery system while co-founding Dyke Action Machine!, a public art project operating outside the market. Within painting she developed the concept of Chromafesto, blending abstraction with representational imagery drawn from feminist history and graphics from 1970s lesbian publications such as Off Our Backs.

Moyer also engages with utopianism. While acknowledging the appeal of separatist or idealistic communities—feminist or queer—she critiques how utopian thinking is now often reduced to nostalgic aesthetics rather than activism. For her, the legacy of AIDS activism—where design and art mobilized public attention—remains a high watermark, though too often treated as a singular moment. She points to Yvonne Rainer as an exemplar: “The most politically satisfying work would be someone like Yvonne Rainer, she makes work that’s extremely didactic… It’s aesthetically very interesting. She never tries to solve the problem inside the work. She lets this paradox exist all the time.”