Underground Scholar
oil, acrylic, color pencil, graphite and collage on illustration board.
6 panels.40" x45"
2023
Water-mixable oil, oil pastel, water color charcoal, crayon, graphite, color pencil and collage (paper and birch bark) onboards.
8 panels. 40"x60"
2021
oil pastel, water - mixable oil, water color, crayon, industrial paint, charcoal, graphite, color pencil, prison floor wax and collage (paper, birchbark, wasp nest and Cambodian paper currency) on illustration boards, 6 panels.40"x45"
No-Touch Torture (To Death)
Water-mixable oils, oil pastel, charcoal, color pencil, graphite and collage (paper, birch bark, corn, shuck, foil and photo by Michael Kenna on paper) on illustration boards, four panels 15”x60”
Moyo 2021
Notes on Excessive Force, 2021
I considered titling this painting When They Call You a Terrorist, after Patrisse Cullors' memoir -- because what happens when the powerful in a society sorted by race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, and mental and physical abilities determine that the marginalized are a threat?
Anything.
All manner of executions.
Outrageously long prison sentences.
Solitary confinement for decades... and this is where we meet this youthful Black figure, sitting quietly and alone in a cell holding an old, crumbling, and rusting bust of a Buddha head. The cell itself is dilapidated but the boy remains a boy. In this case, not because he is a man (as I have said in my poem A Poem Without a Happy Ending): "bereft of experience to become " a man as a result of long decades in the isolation of solitary, but because when he was but a child, his existence was written out of some city, state, and federal budget. In its place, a prison cell was imagined for his future.
This painting developed while I processed painful thoughts and emotions stemming from the police killing of Adam Toledo (sp?), a thirteen year-old Brown boy from the westside of Chicago. After his murder, there was an attempt to make him into a threat -- to call him a terrorist in order to justify him being erased from Earth.
In the wake of the sound of Adam's body breaking under the weight of the police's bullet to his chest, the voices I heard attempting to place his murder in his own thirteen year-old hands triggered memories of my first arrest (also) at the small age of thirteen. For a prank to be cool, my adolescent -- though (now) understandably unwanted behavior was criminalized with the outlandish charge of terroristic threats.
Six years later, while on trial for capital murder, the prosecutor cited the terroristic threat charge as proof that I was essentially never a child -- only a threat. And that the jury needed to vote for my death.
Learning of Adam's murder was so painful for me because I could viscerally feel his tender, complicated, targeted, and at-promise youth -- as well as how so often lives like his and mine are so often subjected to the excessive force of the state in fatal and "less-than-lethal" ways that nevertheless leave us traumatized.
In the end, I landed on the title Excessive Force because I hoped to encourage us to think in nuanced ways about this technical term. Also, I hoped to make the point that there are excessive reserves of force in our communities, in our country. And that is what we mean by defund the police, defund the death penalty -- and why Mumia says: "Let our mission be abolition."
Moyo 2021
On Yupo
9 x 7.5 inches
Moyo 2020
Oil, charcoal, oil pastel, water color, industrial paint on book covers
12 x 17 inches
Moyo 2020
Oil, oil pastel, water color, color pencil on paper on board on board
15 x 20 inches
Moyo 2019
Acrylic, oil, oil pastel, water color, charcoal, birch bark, faux gem on board on board on board
15 x 20 inches
Moyo 2019
Crayon, faux gem on book cover
Moyo 2019
Oil, oil pastel, water color, charcoal, faux gem on board on board on board on board
15 x 18.5 inches
Moyo 2015
Pen and ink, marker and color pencil on handmade paper from Mexico
10 x 10 cm
There isn't a huge story about this one other than to say that isn't release a recurring theme in our lives, or should be?
Sometimes, maybe this piece is telling me/us, the doubt is what you gotta let go of – but that it is also so instructional. The very thing your doubt tells you not to do is the very thing that you should do.
And in the creative process for us humans – creative beings – we serve best our shared inherent creativity when we let go of the blocks to our creativity and let if flow once again.
Moyo 2019
Charcoal, oil, oil pastel, water color, brocade, faux gem, button on board on board
15 x 20 inches
Moyo 2019
15 x 20 inches
For 22 January - Trans Prisoner Day of Action: tho I’m not trans, I have a sense of what that life of struggle is like and I stand for justice for trans people like I do for myself.
Moyo 2019
15 x 20 inches
Buddha Face Tattoo - Medicinal Convict
Moyo 2019
15 x 20 inches
Moyo 2015
Paper collage, screws, a nut, a washer on board
38,5 x 51 cm
This is one of the early Buddhas. It is meant to symbolize the going at it alone that's inherent in the Buddha's story toward enlightenment.
It was real simple (though demanding!) to reach his enlightenment. It didn’t call for a lot of bells and whistles and techy stuff. And that's what I'm trying to say with the metal bits on this one -- I'm trying to say something basic, something that’s uncomplicated.
The matte black paper is an import from a friend and features a Hafiz poem, the dotted paper was found in Wired magazine at Christmas time, intended to be wrapping paper for some gift featured in the magazine.
Moyo 2019
Oil, oil pastel, water color, charcoal, faux gem on board on board
15 x 20 inches
Moyo 2015
Color pencil and white paint from freshly-painted prison cell walls on construction paper on two boards
50,5 x 76,5 cm
This piece was a journey.
I remember after my cell was shaken down – I told you how the cells are searched every 3 months thoroughly. We are locked in our cages all day and fed sake meals – oily peanut butter sandwiches on repeat for a few weeks – and lots of constipation for all the bread. We are only allowed 3 showers per week.
It was during one of these times that the guards, while I was in the shower and they were doing the search, they took a bucket of white paint and covered all the drawings and quotes I had on my wall. One quote was by Gandhi-ji that went: "Strength does not come from physical ability but from an indomitable will."
When the guards brought me back to the cell in cuffs and released me, to clean up the abject mess of my items they’d made, I noticed the pain on the wall over my quotes and that some of the paint was still wet. And having not touched paint like this in YEARS, I was happy for that and used it in this work.
Strangely, this is when the work became more cohesive – out of the transformation of something that wasn’t meant to be beauty but came thru to be when seen in a different light.
We build things to cover up things but that same energy can be used to build something of merit or to uncover some deeper truth that can be more advantageous than our efforts simply to confine.
Moyo 2019
15 x 20 inches
Moyo 2019
15 x 20 inches
Moyo 2015
Watercolor on yupo from a friend
23 x 32,5 cm
I had read something about the idea of Avidya [Sanskrit for ignorance, misunderstanding, incorrect knowledge] in a yoga publication but had forgotten it until one day I sat to make some art after some sort of disturbance.
When I step back from such moments and become aware that something has been going wrong, I have a sense of remorse and I want to fix it, to make up with the person someway, perhaps. But all I can do, most times, is try to look at what happened for myself in the solitude of my cell and make a vow to be more aware next time.
While going over the incident I often make art in the process. This is one such piece. And while in the process this word [Avidya] came to me.
Moyo 2015
Color pencil on a book page
21,5 x 28 cm
I was thinking of metal and sculptures that could be made of it, and the hollowness in them and how that relates to me and life and the Buddhist idea of no-self.
I was thinking, too – as we so often do – of the metal that keeps us here. The bars and the metal walls that hold our bodies.
Moyo 2015
Ink and color pencil on hemp paper from Nepal, on prison-issued art board
15 x 21,5 cm
This past summer for my birthday a friend gave me a book as a gift, “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” which features all sorts of old art works surrounding yogic arts.
In some of the very old instructional texts and diagrams the yogis are depicted in very simple renderings that capture the elegance of the time and reflects to me the simplicity of the essence of yoga.
Those images reminded me of something I'd written in my journal sometime before:
Just an Old Yogi
When I grow old
I now want to be
a wise man
in-tune w/ the cosmos
so that
when I die
I won't die;
when I close my eyes
my eyes will open
and I will see
what I now only sense
and will BE
what I always have.
Moyo 2015
Watercolor, marker, pen, ink and color pencil on hemp paper from Nepal
16 x 21 cm
I work within the space of art sometimes to work out disturbances in my life. So often do I cling – to people, to things, to ideas, to my body – all impermanent and in this constant state of shift, transformation. Yet the pain is when we try to remain the same and not embrace the change.
I encounter moments almost daily that ask that I remember my impermanence. And the impermanence of things – including death row, solitary confinement and its horrors.
Moyo 2016
Ink and color pencil on the cover of a book by Bryan Stevenson
12,5 x 21 cm
I’m always on the look-out for items that I can work with. I guess if I were free I’d be always picking up junk on the street.
This could be a result of how my parents and I when I was a kid would ride around looking at piles of junk people discarded and find items like old coffee tables in need of some love.
My picking up whatever I could find also could be a reaction to my barren environment. We don’t have much in the way of art supplies so you have to have an open eye for something to work with. Or well, this is my approach, others are different and do well with the prescribed supplies.
For me, I like to go beyond that and in so doing I am being free.
Moyo 2016
Ink, watercolor, crayon, acrylic, graphite, faux pearl on yupo
23 x 30,5 cm
Someone I do not know once sent me a card with well wishes and this card was crafty and had attached to it several faux pearls. I kept them.
They made me think of the Mani Stones of the Tibetan Buddhists – stones carved with the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum and stacked into cairn.
These mantras, for compassion, come as the essence imbued in the card I'd received here at a place of death – in the figurative, a charnel house. Or, well...not so figuratively.
Moyo 2015
Color pencil on paper from the artist’s Moleskine
30,5 x 22,5 cm
I made this in the summer of 2015, at a time when I learned that I make art sometimes for some company.
But very strangely, it isn't a seeking of things outside because when you make art you are engaging with yourself. And reflecting yourself.
Moyo 2016
Crayon, color pencil, graphite, acrylic, paper collage and a seed of unknown gangsta genus, found on recreation yard, on board
38 x 51 cm
Reggie once told me that we could use these cells like meditation cells used by monks in monasteries.
The seed [placed in the eyebrow center of the portrait] represents potential. But the design of the piece and the use of minimal light is meant to call to mind a dim-lit space where a meditative mind can be found more easily.
I think that it is interesting that the seed was crushed in transport [traveling across the Atlantic in mail] being Reggie was also crushed.
