Joan Moment (born 1938) is an American painter based in Northern California.Dalkey, Victoria. "Circular Logic: Joan Moment's Works Take on a New Shape," Sacramento Bee, October 29, 1989, p. 16, 24.Olivant, David. "Joan Moment at JayJay and LIMN Galleries," Squarecylinder, September 7, 2009. Retrieved November 15, 2021.Baker, Kenneth. "Abstraction has its Moment," San Francisco Chronicle, August 15, 2009. Retrieved November 18, 2021. She emerged from the 1960s Northern California Funk art movementCouzens, Julia. "Beyond Funk," Squarecylinder, September 9, 2021. Retrieved November 15, 2021.Weidenbaum, Marc. "A Moment in Time," Sactown Magazine, October/November 2013, p. 91–6. Retrieved November 18, 2021. and gained attention when the Whitney Museum of American Art Curator Marcia Tucker selected her for the 1973 Biennial and for a solo exhibition at the Whitney in 1974.Whitney Museum of American Art. Whitney Biennial 1973, Exhibitions. Retrieved November 18, 2021.Tucker, Marcia. Joan Moment, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1974. Retrieved November 18, 2021. Moment is known for process-oriented paintings that employ non-traditional materials and techniques evoking vital energies (biological, sexual, cosmic) conveyed through archetypal iconography.Van Proyen, Mark. "Seeking a Primordial Form," Artweek, December 21, 1985.Paglia, Michael. "Joan Moment and Monroe Hodder Get the Havu Gallery Off to a Running Start in 2011," Westword, January 11, 2011. Retrieved November 18, 2021.Porges, Maria. "Joan Moment: Bluer Than Blue," Numinous: The Paintings of Joan Moment, Sacramento, CA: JayJay Gallery, 2013. Though briefly aligned with Funk—which was often defined by ribald humor and irreverence toward art-world pretensions—her work diverged by the mid-1970s, fusing abstraction and figuration in paintings that writers compared to prehistoric and tribal art.Linhares, Phil. "Interview: Joan Moment," Currant, February–March 1976.Roth, David M. "Sacramento Rising: California's Capitol, A Longtime Artistic Hub Has Finally Come Into Its Own," Art Ltd., September/October 2008, p. S10. Critic Victoria Dalkey wrote that Moment's methods combined chance and improvisation to address "forces embodied in a universe too large for us to comprehend, as well as the ... fragility and transience of the material world."Dalkey, Victoria. "Once and Future Light: Patterns and Connections in 'Aerial Luminations,'" Sacramento Bee, May 21, 2006.
In addition to the Whitney, Moment has exhibited at the Oakland Museum, Crocker Art Museum and Long Beach Museum of Art.Linhares, Phil. From the Studio: Recent Paintings and Sculpture, 20 California Artists, Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum, 1992.Clisby Roger D. Joan Moment, Sacramento, CA: Crocker Art Museum, 1981.Muchnic, Suzanne. "Drawing By California Painters," Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1982. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Crocker and Oakland Museums, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the City of Sacramento, among others.VanAirsdale, S.T. "The Art of the Matter," Sactown Magazine, June/July 2015, p. 77–87. Retrieved November 18, 2021.Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. "New Flavors: Collected at the Candy Store – Selections from the Manetti Shrem Museum." Retrieved November 21, 2022.City of Sacramento. "Joan Moment, A Fragment of the Universe, Programs, Arts + Culture. Retrieved November 18, 2021. She lives in Sacramento and is professor emerita at California State University, Sacramento.Wetterstrom, Sydney. "Joan Moment," Selected Works from the Sacramento State Art Collection, Sacramento, CA: California State University, Sacramento, 2017, p. 15–6.
Early life and career Moment was born in rural Sellersville, Pennsylvania, in 1938, and raised in Fairfield, Connecticut. She earned BS and RN degrees from the University of Connecticut (at Yale Medical Center), where, after graduating in 1960, she worked as a psychiatric and public health RN. Writers have connected her medical experience to the biological undercurrents in her art. In the mid-1960s, her mother's untimely death from illness and the physical suffering she witnessed as a nurse convinced Moment to leave that career for art school. The metaphysical questions provoked by those experiences found voice in Burial (1966), a pivotal, Funk-inspired work consisting of a doll in an open suitcase surrounded by radio tubes, plastic cookie cutters and personal ephemera; it marked Moment's passage into a new phase of her life.O'Brien, Elaine. "To Image the Soul: The Paintings of Joan Moment," Joan Moment: Aerial Luminations, Turlock, CA: California State University, Stanislaus, 2006. Retrieved November 18, 2021. She earned an MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder (1970), studying under Funk artist William T. Wiley and painter and sculptor Roland Reiss. There, she produced work with unconventional materials (horse manure, cheesecloth, household objects) that explored personal fears and experiences.Mangen, Nick. "The Media Compared," Colorado Daily, July 1968.The Washington Post, "Horse Manure Is Show Stopper," July 13, 1968.
In 1970, Moment accepted a teaching position at California State University, Sacramento (CSUS), where she taught sculpture, painting and art history until retiring in 2004.Simon, Richard. "Joan Moment: artists needn't cater to the average person," The Sacramento Union, August 16, 1981, p. D14–5. She also began exhibiting in Northern California, participating in group shows at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Oakland Museum and the Crocker Art Museum (including the international traveling show, "Sacramento Sampler," 1972).Frankenstein, Alfred. "Sacramento Valley," San Francisco Chronicle, April 1972.Clisby Roger D. Sacramento Sampler I, Sacramento, CA: E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, 1972. Retrieved November 18, 2021. These exhibitions preceded her inclusion in the 1973 Whitney Biennial and a solo exhibition there in 1974. Over the next decade, her work appeared in solo exhibition at the Crocker (1981) and in group shows at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (L.A.C.E), Long Beach Museum of Art, and San Jose Museum of Art, among other institutions.Rosenthal, Adrian. "The Animal Kingdom," Artweek, July 1979.Knight, Christopher. "A Cozy Exhibition of Drawings," Los Angeles Herald Examiner, January 24, 1982. During that period, she lived bi-coastally in Sacramento and Manhattan before returning to Sacramento in 1993.
Work Critics have described Moment's painting—spanning mixed media works on paper to wall installations—as "aggressively process-oriented,"Frank, Peter. Joan Moment: Paintings, Works on Paper, and Wall Installations, 1993–2003, Huntington Beach, CA: Huntington Beach Art Center, 2003. Retrieved November 18, 2021. physically immediate, and enduring in its reliance on the natural world as a formal source, despite continual stylistic evolution.Van Proyen, Mark. "Chromamorphology: The Recent Paintings of Joan Moment," Joan Moment: Aerial Luminations, Turlock, CA: California State University, Stanislaus, 2006. Retrieved November 18, 2021.Green, Roger. "Impressive Moments at Galerie Simonne Stern," The States-Item (New Orleans), February 1979. Mark Van Proyen and other critics have linked her art to the "spiritual abstraction" of early modernists such as Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, who sought to convey metaphysical ideas and omnipresent cosmic and transcendent energies.
Moment has worked with varied materials ranging from early mixed media quilts made of cut-up balloons to reliefs made of painted neoprene rubber embedded with layers of gauze or rubber latex. She has also made paintings on vellum, canvas, paper and wood. Methods that she has employed include assemblage, imprinting with found objects or her hands, and "flow painting"—pouring thinned acrylic paint in ways that mimic natural processes, such as flooding, erosion, volcanic activity or cosmic phenomena.Roth, David M. "The Back-Room @ JAYJAY," Squarecylinder, April 11, 2012. Her paintings often rely on the repetition of primordial forms (abstract and referential) in unpredictable arrangements of rich patterning and spontaneous rhythm. Mortality, sexuality, transformation and spirituality have been frequent themes, which she explores using interconnected visual metaphors ranging from the macrocosmic (planets or galaxies) to the microscopic (cells or molecules).
Early painting series (1970–1986) Moment's early series drew on Funk, the postminimalism of Eva Hesse, and tribal art forms, fusing intuitive aspects of contemporary abstraction to the immediacy and directness of naïve art. This work explored and subverted outsider art and "women's work" traditions such as quilting and sewing through unconventional, often irreverent constructions (balloon quilts, latex dresses), sexual references and iconic imagery. The "Condom Relief Series" (1970–2) examined sexuality and the vulnerability and physicality of the body through a feminist lens, drawing responses ranging from amusement to shock. These pieces, fabricated out of cheesecloth, gauze, rubber latex and condoms, combined chance occurrences, warped modernist grids and obsessive dot patterning akin to that seen in Australian Aborigine bark paintings and African clay vessels.Martin, Fred. "Joan Moment," Art International, December 1973. Haloed Condom Relief Piece (1972) employed wiggling networks of condoms applied to a black neoprene ground, surrounded by and painted over with bright colored haloes and dots. Writing in Squarecylinder, Julia Couzens likened their "relentless motion" to writhing "primordial amoebas."
In the mid-1970s, Moment turned to archetypal symbols and forms found in Paleolithic objects, aboriginal and ancient art, and Byzantine mosaics. The "Dotted Mosaic Paintings" (1973–1975) depicted flat, deadpan, iconic forms—animals, fish, plants, people, tropical landscapes and mountains—composed in vibrating, bright dots of color on black rubberized grounds (e.g., Waterfall, 1973). Marcia Tucker described them as "haunting forgotten Edens" that offered "a keyhole view of paradise, a still and magical world that seduces, enchants, and captivates with eccentric, impossible delights." In the "Pattern Paintings" (1978–84), Moment painted crudely rendered geometric shapes on gesso-treated cheesecloth, dresses and chairs—rejecting the conventional square or rectilinear painting format (e.g., Shirt Totem or Rug Dress, 1978). Their textured surfaces, covered in checkerboard, gridded, concentric or dotted patterns, referenced contemporary concerns with camouflage, aboriginal art, superficiality and the masking power of clothing (Cocktail Dress, 1978).