Frank C. Moore II was a New York-based painter, winner of the Logan Medal of the arts, and a member of the Visual Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Artist Caucus—the organization responsible for the Ribbon Project, A Day Without Art, and A Night Without Light.
Education
Born in Manhattan in 1953, Moore moved with his family to Long Island, New York, first to Great Neck, and then to Roslyn, where he first attended Roslyn Junior High School. He graduated from Roslyn High School in 1971, where he had been active in student politics and served as class president He attended Yale, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1975, and he studied at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris from 1977 to 1979.
Career
Moore"s work was selected for display for years in the high school halls. They were eventually removed during a renovation and subsequently lost. His art began appearing in group exhibitions in 1979, as he worked as a set designer for modern dance choreographer Jim Self in Manhattan.
Deeply indebted to Surrealism, Moore"s paintings frequently depict dream scenarios and futuristic landscapes, often with environmental sub-texts (in a picture-postcard Niagara Falls, chemical signatures of pollutants drift in the mist), or references to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (in Viral Romance, 1992, a reversed bouquet blooms human immunodeficiency virus).
He died of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome on April 21, 2002, aged 48.
Politics
His political stance was broad and nuanced with homoerotic imagery. Late in 2012, the double exhibition Toxic Beauty, comprising the most comprehensive review of Moore"s work, was on view at New York University.