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
- Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2011, 185 pp. Street-level history of artists’ groups and collective activity by artists in New York from 1969 to 1985.
- 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. Author.
- Links
