After receiving her BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, Carrie Moyer created a series of agitprop posters and works on paper. This early body of work, which explored the representation of queer women in mainstream media, led to the formation of Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!; 1991–2004), a collaborative public art project with the photographer Sue Schaffner. Inserting imagery of borderline stereotypical lesbian identity into various commercial contexts, Moyer and Schaffner plastered high-volume poster campaigns throughout the city. Often pasting over existing advertisements with their own agitprop images that centered and celebrated queer women, DAM! challenged the heteronormative nature of societal representation. Upon returning to painting, Moyer recalls, “part of the friction was how could I bring the sentiment and urgency of the agitprop I’d made for queer organizations and Dyke Action Machine! into the studio. How does one render it through abstraction?” Ultimately for Moyer, the disparate bodies of work that define her extensive practice, the agitprop posters and sensual paintings, are one and the same. She concludes, “The posters and paintings share a declarative, public-facing voice that is transmitted through the use of symmetry and other framing devices, melding the idealistic fervor of twentieth-century abstraction and agitprop with a metaphysics of the lesbian body.”
