Photo Dan Bradica Studio/©2025 Donald Moffett/Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Anthony Meier, Mill Valley
The title of Donald Moffett’s latest exhibition, “Snowflake,” is a deliberate provocation.“I don’t identify as a snowflake,” he told me, a week before the opening of the show, his first New York solo since 2019. “I could be charged as a snowflake, and I would gladly wear it. However, as a negative nomenclature, it works for me in the same way that my first New York show did.”
He was referring to “I Love It When You Call Me Names,” the title of both a 1983 a Joan Armatrading song and his own 1989 exhibition at Wessel O’Connor Gallery, which was then located in SoHo. Back then, at the height of the AIDS crisis, Moffett was involved with the ACT UP–affiliated artist collective Gran Fury, and his work, he said, had been labeled “homo art.” Moffett told me he sees a “circularity” between the two shows, which were realized more than 30 years apart. “At that moment, it felt important to give the show that name, just like it feels important now to name this show ‘Snowflake,’” he added.
Moffett also sees a relationship between the term “snowflake” and the current climate crisis, which he began addressing in his work several years ago. Of the abstractions now being shown at Alexander Gray Associates gallery in Tribeca, Moffett said, “They remain lush on the surface. This show is very much about what stands right behind that in several ways: physically, philosophically, politically, even emotionally.”
He pointed to two new paintings, Lot 052525 (nature cult, melt 1) and Lot 061625 (nature cult, melt A), both of which feature globs of oil paint that he has stretched into thin tendrils via cake-decorating tools, then mounted onto cut wood panels. True to their name, they seem to represent snow—a just-fallen, pristine white in the case of the former, and a dirtied, almost-black pewter for the latter—sliding off a surface.
“The substrate itself is melting away from behind the painted surface—physically, that’s fairly straightforward,” Moffett said. “The metaphor deepens as far as you want to take it, and its philosophical potential is there.”
Photo Dan Bradica Studio
Except for two works, both done in an icy blue, the exhibition’s works are generally done in shades of black and white. It’s a palette that’s markedly more somber than the deep reds, blues, and greens that appeared in Moffett’s work in his 2019 show at Marianne Boesky in Chelsea. “These are dark times—no question about it,” he said. The white, he said, is meant to serve a “hopeful reflex” to the black tones. “It’s the extreme of the time we find ourselves in.”
A few hours after our interview, Moffett followed up to add, “My choices were restricted to somewhat mimic the choices that we all face in the present political climate, which are stark—and more or less black and white.”
These built-up works, which he calls “extruded paintings,” have their roots in the years following the AIDS crisis. During the ’90s, as antiretroviral therapy became available, making an HIV-positive diagnosis no longer seem like a life sentence, the activism of Gran Fury and ACT UP began to wind down. Moffett, the artist behind some of the most direct expressions of anger over Republican complacency at the time, decided he needed to change his approach to art. The exhaustion of that decade, he said, was “palpable and real,” and he believed that perhaps he was “spent in the studio as well. As an antidote to that, I thought, let me go look elsewhere.” He turned to cake decorating.
During one of his lessons, Moffett’s mind shifted from frosting to paint. He returned to the studio reenergized and began running experiments on how to manipulate his paint as though it were icing. He started with acrylics but found that they didn’t behave the way he wanted them to, so instead he tried oil paints. “It’s oil paint through and through—unadulterated, unvarnished, literally,” he said.
Photo Dan Bradica Studio
Some 30 years later, Moffett still believes that, in abstraction, there are “riches there that can be more profound than, let’s say, the figure. There’s a show to prove it.”
He continued, “I still feel like [abstraction] is a welcoming avenue for the broad contemplation of the social and the political. These works out here are fairly descriptive. They still slide into the territory of abstraction, but I would disagree that that’s where they stop. There’s a bleeding out of the definition of abstraction that is part of this new body of work.”
Photo Dan Bradica Studio
That “bleeding out” from the abstract into the political is underscored by Moffett’s titles. Lot 030525 (nature cult, arctic probe), for example, appears to be a snowy landscape from which variously shaped ice cores have been extracted, while Lot 060825 (nature cult, flood) resembles surging flood waters, perhaps caused by melting ice caps. The all-black Lot 062525 (nature cult, first snow) paints an even grimmer picture of what our future holds.
The exhibition also includes three bumper stickers, part of a larger ongoing series that Moffett first began showing as artworks for his 2022 exhibition at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, his hometown. Earlier in his career, Moffett created postcards that were similarly presented “in a block and free to take,” but he deemed those “a lot raunchier and a lot more aggressive” than the bumper stickers. The three in the current show read: “SCIENCE”; “KILL NOTHING”; and “LAUGH. RIOT.”
Photo Dan Bradica Studio
These pieces call to mind one of Moffett’s most iconic works, He Kills Me (1987), in which a black-and-orange target is paired with a black-and-white photograph of then President Ronald Reagan. Below Reagan’s image are the words “He Kills Me.” The work was made the same year that Reagan first addressed the AIDS crisis, six years into the epidemic, by which point tens of thousands had already died. “It’s never out of mind—ever—in terms of the graphic potential of my own skills and of language, and it’s efficacy,” Moffett said of his recent return to text-based pieces.
“Snowflake,” which opened last Friday and is on view until October 25, marks Moffett’s first exhibition with Alexander Gray, after having shown with Marianne Boesky for 23 years. His decision to join a new gallery was more about wanting to try something new. “I thought, if I’m ever going to make a change just to try other architecture, other minds, and other possibilities, it’s time to do it,” he said. He first met Alexander Gray long before he started his eponymous gallery in 2007. In addition to their long friendship, it was ultimately the gallery’s program that made him decide. “There is a handful of artists here that I adore and follow, so it was an easy decision when it came time to make a decision.”
Photo Dan Bradica Studio/©2025 Donald Moffett/Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Anthony Meier, Mill Valley
For this exhibition, Moffett has also included an older piece that showcases just how he merges abstraction with his politics. In the gallery’s backroom hangs a rectangular canvas that is completely covered in waves upon waves of oil paint in a sleek metallic silver. Onto this Moffett has projected a nearly 15-minute video that shows the White House at night. The footage is grainy and ominous, making the White House feel menacing and sinister. Made in 2004, during a different contentious political moment, Aluminum/White House Unmoored feels as relevant now as it did two decades ago.
When asked why he decided to show this work again, Moffett replied simply, “The piece is always with me. We’ve shown it at apropos moments over the years, and this is just one more. It’s an important time for art, artists, and galleries. I think artists can play a role and are challenged to.”
He added, “Let’s light the match.”
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