TAOS, NM.- The Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico presents the exhibition Out of the Woods: Work by Sabra Moore organized by curator Margaret Bullock. The exhibition will be on view through Sunday, March 4, 2007. It will showcase recent works that continue Moore’s exploration of ecological, political and personal concerns through constructed and painted artworks.

Sabra Moore is an artist and art activist whose work is based on the quilt-making traditions of her East Texas grandmothers, and the artistic traditions of West Africa, as well as her twenty plus years of participation in the feminist art movements in New York City and personal experimentation. She has stated “I consider myself a ‘literate granddaughter’ and have translated the elements of quilt-making (the use of repeated patterns, resonant materials, narrative) into sewn and painted artworks.”

Moore was born in Texarkana, Texas and educated at the Centre for West African Studies, The University of Birmingham, England and the Brooklyn Museum Art School before acquiring her B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a member of the HERESIES Collective, a feminist publication on art and politics, President of the NYC/Women’s Caucus for Art and an activist in the Women’s Action Coalition and RepoHistory. She moved to Abiquiu, New Mexico in the early 1990s where she has organized a number of collaborative shows, including the Farm Show (a collaboration between farmers from the Espanola Farmers’ Market and northern New Mexico artists) and Trees and Faces at the Santa Fe International Academy of Art. She is also the author and illustrator of Petroglyphs: Ancient Language/Sacred Art published by Clear Light Publishers in 1998.

Sabra Moore’s artwork has been included in more than one hundred exhibitions in New York City, Canada, Brazil and New Mexico. She also has curated many large-scale women’s exhibitions including Reconstruction Project, based on a Maya Codex, and Connections Project/Conexus, a collaboration between women artists from Brazil and the United States. Her artist’s books can be found in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Brooklyn Art Museum. She is creating a handmade catalogue for the exhibition that will be available for purchase.

Her body of work encompasses constructed sculptures and paintings in a variety of media and sizes. They are assembled using stitching, painting, photocopying, transfer printing, even sometimes carpentry and metalworking. She has stated: “I usually work in paper or wood, and often include found materials or texts which I combine by sewing with string and beads or twisted wire…I like to explore visual ideas and stories through a series of works.”

Sabra Moore’s works interweave many disparate references ranging from personal and family history to the political. Curator Bullock has said of her work: “Sabra Moore’s works are not only visually rich—full of texture and color and technically masterful— but they also have impact beyond the purely aesthetic. They seek to open our eyes to aspects of our world that we overlook or seek to avoid.”