Peter Moore

NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Peter Moore. The exhibition will be on view from January 17 through February 28, 2009 at 465 West 23rd Street.

This show of vintage photographs focuses on two rich years, 1968 and 1969, in Peter Moore’s long and prolific career as a visual historian of avant-garde art in New York City. These years coincide with the founding season of the Paula Cooper Gallery, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary in October of 2008. Conceived in collaboration with Barbara Moore, the show will include black and white photographs as well as slide projections of rarely seen color images.

Moore’s work documents that heated moment in the art world of the late sixties when experimental performance, music, dance and visual art intersected in radical and transformative ways. Selected from his archive of over half-a-million photographs, this show presents iconic images of Yvonne Rainer, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Simone Forti, James Lee Byars, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, George Maciunas, Milan Knížák, Allan Kaprow and others. Forty years after these ephemeral performances, happenings, and events, Moore’s photographs present a pivotal history of artists at the forefront of avant-garde experimentation and exploration.

After a stint in the photo labs of Life magazine, Peter Moore (1932-1993) worked as an assistant to the industrial photographer O. Winston Link in the 1950s. As a part of New York’s blossoming art community in the early 1960s, he began what was to become an unmatched photographic archive of Fluxus, Judson Dance Theater, and countless happenings and performances. His images have been widely published in texts about the period, including Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (1983), In the Spirit of Fluxus (1993), Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002 (2002), and Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performace, Intermedia and Rutgers University 1958–1972 (2003); among others. Moore’s photographs were included in the 1970 show “Happenings and Fluxus” at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany; “Alternative Gestures: Another Look at Dance Photography” at P.S. 1, Long Island City, New York (1978); the Fluxus pavilion at the 1990 Venice Biennale; “In the Spirit of Fluxus” at the Walker Art Center in 1993; “Art, Lies and Videotape” at Tate Liverpool (2003); “Street Art Street Life” at the Bronx Museum (on view through January 25, 2009), among many others. He has had one-person exhibitions around the world, including Ecart, Geneva, Switzerland (1980); Gallery 360, Tokyo, Japan (1989); Galerie Alfred Kren, Cologne, Germany (“The Avant-Garde Observed,” 1990); and at Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 2004. From 1978 to 1989 he was the Senior Technical Editor of Modern Photography magazine. In 2000, D.A.P. published The Destruction of Penn Station, which presented Moore’s previously-unseen documentation of New York’s Pennsylvania Station demolition.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com