Lunchtime Art Talk on Dominique Moody
The Hammer's curatorial department leads free, insightful, short discussions about artists every Wednesday at 12:30 p.m.
Wednesday Oct 11, 2023, 12:30 pm
Free

This talk on Dominique Moody is led by Project manager, exhibitions and publications Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow.
Dominique Moody works at the intersection of assemblage, performance, and life. In tune with her ancestral diasporic kin from West Africa, her practice is an ode to more than sixty years of life as an urban nomad. Moody uses everyday objects to create assemblages, transforming abandoned items like glass bottles, wood, and toys into sculptures and site-specific installations. Her work is part of a long-standing tradition of sculpture and assemblage with solid roots in the mid-twentieth-century history of South Los Angeles. In Moody’s own words, “True freedom is being at home in the world,” and as a manifestation of that ethos, in 2015 she created N.O.M.A.D., a 150-square-foot multipurpose mobile structure that the artist describes as an “inspiration studio.” As a celebration of the artist’s itinerant lifestyle, the piece proposes an exceptional case for life as a creative act while looking proactively at the housing crisis in urban centers throughout the United States. Functioning as a residence and a studio, N.O.M.A.D. offers Moody both a living space and the opportunity to merge the ethics of movement and her artistic practice, engaging with communities across the country. Moody works with neighbors and the public in dialogue, workshops, storytelling, and social exchange. Her work challenges the commodification of art and the market-driven economy, reflecting on the power of art to create spaces for reunion and domestic spaces for liberation and creation.