Donald Moffett: Snowflake

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Donald Moffett: Snowflake, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery. The show features new extruded oil and spray paintings alongside an installation of bumper stickers and Aluminum/White House Unmoored (2004). Collectively, these works explore the fraught possibilities of politically engaged art in an era of escalating crises—from climate change to democratic breakdown to institutional erosion.

This complexity has shaped Moffett’s work since the 1980s. As a founding member of Gran Fury, the collective that emerged from ACT UP in 1988 to create some of the most powerful graphics of the AIDS crisis, Moffett leveraged the power of visual culture for immediate impact. Gran Fury’s posters, stickers, billboards, and interventions had a remarkable economy of meaning, piercing public complacency with clarity and employing bold aesthetics for direct communication. Simultaneously, through Bureau, the design studio he co-founded with artist Marlene McCarty in 1989, Moffett applied these same principles of visual precision and social engagement to non-profit and commercial clients. In his individual work, however, he adopted a subtler strategy, embedding content within abstraction's legacy of formal experimentation and philosophical inquiry.

The show's artworks refine this approach through their physical presence. Crafted in white, pewter, and powdery blue, the paintings' pierced and drilled forms seem to dissolve into the Gallery's walls or float in front of them, suggesting systems under stress. “The surface holds—lush and fragile,” Moffett notes. “The structure and substructure drift, melt, and erode.” This tension between surface and structure defines his NATURE CULT series, which he began in the 2010s to draw attention to the impact of accelerating climate change. While these works’ surfaces maintain a seductive beauty, they reveal a layered paradox: fabricated from paints and plywood with real ecological costs, they confront the contradictions involved in addressing the environmental crisis through material culture. The irony extends further—these materials could well outlast the climate crisis itself, enduring emblems to a civilization's contradictory relationship with its environment.

If Moffett’s Snowflake paintings materially manifest this paradox, Aluminum/White House Unmoored (2004) makes it explicit through its subject. Created during George W. Bush’s presidency—an era marked by oil wars and environmental deregulation—the piece has gained urgent, almost prophetic relevance as American democracy faces threats far greater than before. What started as artistic speculation now feels like uncanny documentation: the projected White House disintegrates onscreen, its symbolic authority as fleeting as snow melting in a warming world. The work’s lasting impact underscores both Moffett’s insight and the peculiar temporal position of visual art. Unlike storytelling or song, which can deliver immediate emotional effect, urgency in visual art builds over time through sustained contemplation rather than direct address.

This temporal shift also influences the exhibition’s free-to-take bumper stickers. Moffett’s stickers reflect his Gran Fury and Bureau work with bold, direct language meant to provoke an immediate response. However, their physical form—intended for bodies, cars, and the streets, rather than screens—illustrates the evolving challenges of activist communication. In an era when climate protestors storm museums and social media spreads discourse at viral speeds, these analog statements evoke an earlier era of resistance and call for its return. They are artifacts from a time when messages traveled at the speed of traffic, not tweets, when engagement required physical presence rather than digital circulation.

What emerges is art that genuinely explores the possibilities and limits of aesthetic intervention. The dissolution Moffett captures is both captivating and unsettling as it unfolds within the Gallery. In a period when glaciers melt and institutions decay at unprecedented rates, the artist's work serves as a meditation on art's inherent constraints: its capacity to illuminate crises while remaining bound by the very frameworks it seeks to challenge.

Moffett’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett: ONE DAY, Alice Austen House, Staten Island, NY (2025); NATURE CULT, SEEDED, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland (2024); DONALD MOFFETT + NATURE CULT + THE McNAY, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2022); The Extravagant Vein, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2011), traveled to The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, and Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (both 2012); and Donald Moffett: What Barbara Jordan Wore, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2002). His work has also been featured in many group shows, including Gran Fury: Arte não é o bastante (Gran Fury: Art is Not Enough), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Brazil (2024); This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2024); Every Moment Counts—AIDS and its Feelings, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway (2022); United by AIDS—An Exhibition about Loss, Remembrance, Activism and Art in Response to HIV/AIDS, Migros Museum für Gegenwartkunst, Zurich, Switzerland (2019); and the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Moffett’s work is featured in global public and private collections, including the the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, TX; Brooklyn Museum, NY; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others.