ABOUT

Mary Moore

Mary Moore was born in Birmingham, Alabama (1950) and grew up there, on Enon Ridge, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968). Participating in an educational programme established by the American Friends Service Committee (Quaker), later directed by the NAACP, she left Birmingham to finish high school in Port Washington, New York in the late 1960’s. After graduation she went on to Pratt Institute to study Fashion Design, but, left before starting her second year there to travel for an indefinite time abroad. Eventually, having settled into life in the Netherlands, she completed the Painting and Drawing curriculum at The Willem de Kooning Academy. Moore lives and works in the Netherlands.

The Work/ The Beginning

“Of all the places I had lived and visited as a young girl and young women, Rotterdam would prove to be, developmentally, the most necessary, and, the most confounding.

In usual adolescent fashion I had not processed at any meaningful level many of the intensely challenging and often disturbing experiences living more than a decade away from home, including the years abroad, brought with them. So, age and circumstance spurred not only the need to settle into a stable home life where I could create time and space for reflection, but also to participate in and be part of a community. I could, however, neither mentally grasp nor connect emotionally to the people or place. In Amsterdam where I lived some years before, all one needed to do to feel inspired and energized was to take a walk through town or along the canals. There, one lived at the heart of a kind of jostle between contemporary life and historical context.

Of course a mere thirty years before, the Second World War had taken place bringing with it very specific losses and tragedies to Rotterdam: Hermann Goring’s (Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe) orders to bomb the city in retaliation to the Dutch Resistances’ refusal (initially) to capitulate, is considered one of the first great atrocities at the onset of the war (May 14, 1940). Though I still had no real notion of the war’s far reaching impact on the city and it’s people, I did know that life does not consist of only the contemporary; that the architecture of a city dating from the 1300’s could not have somehow magically been transformed into that of the 1950’s and 60’s.

Thus began my hungry and curious hunt for The Old Places as I called them. Historical markers and signs were not always overt or easy to read, but I slowly learned to see and experience the city from a more insightful and informed perspective. My search would later develop and expand into the project I named The Treasury, and came to include the streets I lived on and walked, in my childhood and youth.

In the 1980’s I unwittingly made photographs of an old country estate that would soon be completely lost: when left standing empty it was wrecked by vandals and fire, then, in 1988, totally demolished. This place continued to fuel my curiosity for many years. On researching it’s rise and decline I inadvertently learned a great deal about the city’s shipping, banking, social, and cultural history. This very satisfying way of learning rewarded me not only with local historical awareness, it helped shift and broaden my artistic focus, reinforcing my personal beliefs of greater, universal principles in time, place, and culture. It took me out of the local and into the world at large; to my own childhood in the United States, then back to the Netherlands again, full circle, becoming an important aid in helping me to formulate my own artistic, visual vocabulary.”

Mary Moore, 2025