Alan W. Moore
Alan Willard Moore (1951) is a writer and editor who also worked as an artist, organizer and professor of art history.
Moore studied art history and journalism in California, from 1969-1974. He moved to New York City in 1974 as an intern for Artforum magazine, and also worked with Art-Rite. He joined the artists’ group Colab (Collaborative Projects) in 1977, and worked with them continuously as an organizer and video artist. Although the group formally ended in 1989, members continue to be active informally. He ran the MWF Video Club distribution project for artists’ work on video from 1986 to 2002. Papers relating to the MWF project have been deposited (Spring, 2019) in the Film and Theater Collection at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Moore was a co-founder of the cultural center ABC No Rio in 1980, and a writer and art editor at the East Village Eye news magazine. In 1991 he returned to school for a PhD in art history (City University of New York, 2000). His dissertation research was on artists’ collectives, published in 2011 as Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City. In 2009 he embarked on a research project to explore squatting in Europe, publishing House Magic, an annual review on the culture of political squatting. He relocated to Madrid, Spain. In 2015 he wrote Occupation Culture: Art and Squatting in the City from Below, and edited Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces. (2022)
Publications[edit]
- Books
- editor, with Marc Miller, ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery, New York: ABC No Rio with Collaborative Projects, 1985, vi+195 pp. "A catalogue of the gallery's first five years as well as an exploration of the broader artistic context from which it emerged. Featuring art and articles from the time, it provides a contemporaneous, grass-roots account of artists, groups, and ideas at the onset of the art boom of the 1980s."
- Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2011, vii+185 pp. Blog. Street-level history of artists’ groups and collective activity by artists in New York from 1969 to 1985. Publisher. Review: Battista (Art M).
- Occupation Culture: Art and Squatting in the City from Below, Minor Compositions, 2015, 378 pp. Book website. Publisher.
- editor, with Alan Smart, Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, and Other Forms, 2015, 355 pp.
- Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld, JOAAP, 2022, 236 pp. Memoir. Outline. Publisher. Book website.
- Chapters, articles
- with Jim Cornwell, "Local History: The Art of Battle for Bohemia in New York", in Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault, University of Minnesota Press, with New York: Drawing Center, 2002. [1]
- "Welcome to Our Resistance: The What and Why of the Tompkins Square Park Rebellion", in Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side, ed. Clayton Patterson, et al., New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. Introduction. Publisher.
- "Artists' Collectives: Focus on New York, 1975-2000", in Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, eds. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, University of Minnesota Press, 2007, pp 192-221.
- "Preface: Coming in from the Cold", in Alex Gross, The Untold Sixties: When Hope Was Born, New York: Cross-Cultural Research Projects, 2009. [2]
- "The Art Workers’ Coalition: The Return of the Avant-Garde", brumaria 15-16: "Art Workers’ Coalition", eds. Dario Corbeira and Daniel Patrick Rodriguez, Madrid: Brumaria, 2010. Publisher. [3] (English)/(Spanish)
- "Art Workers Want to Know", ephemera 14(3): "The Politics of Workers' Inquiry", Aug 2014, pp 465-473, PDF.
- "ABC No Rio as an Anarchist Space", in Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab's Saloon to Occupy Wall Street, ed. Tom Goyens, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017, pp 201-220.
