In a world so full of distractions, Sam Moyer’s art tricks us into paying close attention.
The 42-year-old artist, the subject of two high-profile exhibitions in New York, once stacked dozens of hand-painted glass blocks in the window of a downtown New York art gallery to make it look like a solid red brick facade. From inside, backlighting brought each individual brushstroke into focus, revealing the material’s masquerade.
A few years earlier, at a gallery show in 2014, she affixed fabric dyed to resemble geological formations to slabs of marble. It was nearly impossible to tell which surface was which without walking right up to the wall. “I don’t want to say it was a gimmick, because it wasn’t coming from a place of a gimmick, but it was definitely trying to pull something off,” Moyer, dressed in overalls and a T-shirt, said on a recent afternoon. In the front room of her studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, stone slabs in shades of gray, pearl and peach lean against A frames; it looks more like a granite supply store than an artist’s work space.
Moyer is a trickster — but a very mild-mannered one. Over the past 18 years, in large-scale installations and modest objects, she has provoked a what’s-going-on-there response from the viewer, to “bring an awareness to the land or the space or the light or your body that you wouldn’t have had before,” she said. She first drew the attention of art-world tastemakers in the early 2010s, when she began showing dyed canvases she had made by dragging a piece of fabric the length of a school bus through a field on Long Island and leaving it out to dry. Cropped from the huge swath, the final works evoked rumpled bedsheets, light-dappled surfaces and variegated stone. “A lot of people said, ‘It looks like marble,’” Moyer noted. On a 2013 visit to the Rothko Chapel, the nondenominational temple in Houston created by the Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, Moyer had a stroke of inspiration. She wrote herself a note: “Put the marble in the painting.”
Moyer learned about creating captivating illusions with light and material on movie sets, where her father was a gaffer on films including “Risky Business” and “Groundhog Day.” But unlike a moviemaker, Moyer wanted to draw her viewers’ attention to the mechanics behind the illusion, not obscure it.
For her M.F.A. thesis, she photographed a fog machine and a studio light in a field, placing at center stage the tools that film crews use to fabricate an atmosphere. As a recent art-school graduate making ends meet by working as an art handler, she decided to stretch the moving blankets used to protect paintings onto frames, making a trick of the trade into the main event. When she showed the blanket works at P.S. 1 in 2009, some visitors may have initially thought they had missed the show, or arrived too early.
To create the latest series of what Moyer calls her “stone paintings,” which are on view in a solo show at Sean Kelly Gallery (through June 14), she begins by getting down on the floor and arranging pieces of marble into patterns resembling ferns. Then she cuts the final design into a wooden sheet and covers its surface with canvas and plaster. Then comes the final step: inlaying the stone. Once the completed work is hanging on the wall, the luminous stone fragments look as though they are floating, weightless, in the milky plaster.
“She is one of the masters of playing with materials in our moment,” said Daniel S. Palmer, the chief curator at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Ga. “The experience of Sam Moyer’s art is so profound because it’s not just visual. Sam’s work brings you back into your body through the feeling of weight, the tactility and veins of the stone.”
In his previous role as curator of the Public Art Fund, Palmer organized Moyer’s ambitious public art installation “Doors for Doris,” installed at Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza in 2020. (Freedman, a prominent advocate for public art in New York City, founded the Public Art Fund in 1977.) Three portals, each more than 10 feet tall and made of marble, bluestone and concrete, swung partway open like prehistoric revolving doors designed for giants. By combining steel and concrete, which form the backbone of the city’s architecture, with bluestone, a bedrock stone of Manhattan, and marble sourced from around the world, Moyer offered a metaphor for the city. She also liked the idea of uniting the materials that constitute the park and the Midtown buildings surrounding it. The Buffalo AKG Art Museum acquired the work last year and plans to install it in a new waterfront park in 2026.
Because “Doors for Doris” was originally on view during the pandemic, relatively few people saw it in Manhattan. But Moyer’s work has another opportunity to captivate and amuse New Yorkers with her exhibitions at Sean Kelly and the Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea (through Aug. 1).
For the show at Hill Art, the hedge-fund billionaire J. Tomilson Hill, who founded the exhibition space with his wife, Janine, invited Moyer to comb through its collection of Modern masters and pair anything she wanted with her own work. She assembled pieces by a merry band of fellow tricksters, including a plaster sink by the American sculptor Robert Gober and a balsa wood eraser sculpture by the Latvian American artist Vija Celmins that looks as smooth and pliable as the real thing.
“What Sam really wants you to do is slow down and look and think,” Hill said. “We are so inundated with constant motion. She wants you to take a deep breath.” Hill began collecting Moyer’s work over a decade ago after his daughter, Astrid, brought it to his attention. Last summer, he installed her towering sculpture of a hinge at his East Hampton home opposite an interlocking stone figure by the Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi.
At the Hill Foundation, Moyer has created what she describes as a “posthumous collaboration” with Noguchi, with whom she shares a love of stone. She installed a grid of handmade paper works in the window of the gallery that houses Noguchi’s 1969 Portuguese marble sculpture, “Woman With Holes II.” When the light streams through her latticelike design, it casts grid lines across the undulating marble form. “I’m interacting with artists that I’ve just always dreamed of,” she said.
Moyer, who grew up outside Los Angeles, intended to become a photojournalist. But she changed her mind on her first day at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., which happened to be Sept. 11, 2001. As she watched her classmates race to the White House to capture history as it unfolded, she realized that the pace and directness of news photography was not for her. She eventually changed her major to fine art and received her M.F.A. at Yale University.
Moyer jokes that the Sean Kelly presentation, which depicts ferns as they round the corner from full bloom to wilting, is her midlife crisis show. She is in the thick of her care-taking years, with a 5-year-old son she shares with her husband, the painter Eddie Martinez, and aging, though still independent, parents.
As an artist who lifts heavy sheets of rock, she has been thinking a lot about how her practice will change as her body ages. The moody palette of her new works is partly inspired by the late paintings of Claude Monet, whose eyesight began to fail at the end of his life.
“The price of perspective seems to be decay,” Moyer said.
Yet she approaches this transition with equanimity. “I have curiosity around it,” she said.
Her life and the lives of her materials are entwined, the magical and the mundane together. She delights, for example, in examining a contractor’s scribble on a piece of stone or the stains indicating that a block was left out in the snow. Marble is “one of the oldest art supplies, but it’s also your kitchen counter,” Moyer said. “Everything I use, you come in contact with every single day.”
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