The title of Donald Moffett’s latest exhibition, “Snowflake,” is a deliberate provocation.“I don’t identify as a snowflake,” he told me, a week before the opening of the show, his first New York solo since 2019. “I could be charged as a snowflake, and I would gladly wear it. However, as a negative nomenclature, it works for me in the same way that my first New York show did.”
He was referring to “I Love It When You Call Me Names,” the title of both a 1983 a Joan Armatrading song and his own 1989 exhibition at Wessel O’Connor Gallery, which was then located in SoHo. Back then, at the height of the AIDS crisis, Moffett was involved with the ACT UP–affiliated artist collective Gran Fury, and his work, he said, had been labeled “homo art.” Moffett told me he sees a “circularity” between the two shows, which were realized more than 30 years apart. “At that moment, it felt important to give the show that name, just like it feels important now to name this show ‘Snowflake,’” he added.
Moffett also sees a relationship between the term “snowflake” and the current climate crisis, which he began addressing in his work several years ago. Of the abstractions now being shown at Alexander Gray Associates gallery in Tribeca, Moffett said, “They remain lush on the surface. This show is very much about what stands right behind that in several ways: physically, philosophically, politically, even emotionally.”
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