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.

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.

Free and open to the public.