Mario Moore

Mario Moore is a Detroit native whose practice spans painting, drawing, and sculpture to confront the personal, social, and political conditions that continue to shape access, belonging, and power in American life. Presenting counternarratives that challenge canonical American stories, Moore interweaves history, art history, politics, and literature to explore the cyclical nature of national memory and denial. His work bridges past and present by unearthing the mythos of American culture through a lens of overlooked figures — from prominent Black abolitionists to frontier laborers. At the heart of his pursuit is a refusal to separate beauty from truth, or history from accountability. 

Moore received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and his MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art. He is a 2023 Kresge Arts Fellow and a recipient of the Princeton Hodder Fellowship. His work has been exhibited nationally, with pieces held in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Princeton University Art Museum, among others. His first museum survey, Enriched: Presence & Preservation, opened at the Charles H. Wright Museum and traveled to the California African American Museum. His most recent institutional exhibition, Revolutionary Times, opened at the Flint Institute of Arts and activated Black resistance through recovered histories and representational clarity.

In this talk, Moore will speak through a practice grounded in rigorous research and material precision, drawing from archives, ancestral memory, and art historical traditions to interrogate the afterlives of history in contemporary life. His paintings operate with a technical mastery that privileges the hand — its labor, presence, and refusal of erasure. Influenced by artists like Diego Velázquez, Moore insists on a visibility of process, where the rendered figure is not a symbol or spectacle, but a full human being, liberated in feeling. Extending this ethos into sculpture, he considers how form, weight, and scale can mark space with presence, asserting memory in the built environment and reordering the canon through acts of embodiment. His work constitutes both record and reckoning: a sustained effort to visualize care, sovereignty, and the depth of lives long denied monument. 

This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan.

Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS, ALL ARTS, and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.