From left: artist b. Robert Moore (photo by Andrew Sans), journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones (photo by Jason Hill) and regenerative land sculptor and activist Jordan Weber (photo by Andre D. Wagner)
By Michael Morain
The local artist b. Robert Moore’s current exhibition in the Des Moines Art Center’s annual Iowa Artists series is like a good book in the way that it’s both intensely personal and broadly relatable. Through painted family portraits, a video interview with his mother, and even a re-created living room filled with ordinary furniture and tchotchkes, “In Loving Memory” memorializes some of the family and friends who shaped him. A somber grayscale portrait called “Mother of Pearls” honors his mentor Teree Caldwell-Johnson, who died in March.
But for all the visual cues that point toward Moore’s specific identity — biracial, father, early 40s — bigger themes about race, labor and military service place “the political and historic alongside the personal and poetic,” as curator Laura Burkhalter notes in the exhibition catalog.
She moderated a wide-ranging panel discussion on Sunday afternoon with Moore, the artist-activist Jordan Weber and the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning creator of “The 1619 Project” for the New York Times. Here are a few takeaways from their talk, lightly condensed for clarity:
Hannah-Jones on the nature of history: “We learn a very curated version of the past. It’s really about shaping our collective memory of who we are as a society to justify power, to justify inequalities, to justify all the systems we engage with.
“All three of us on this stage are trying to actively engage the history that’s been left out of the focus of the lens, to expand the aperture. The silences are telling you just as much about your country and your community as the things that you’ve learned. With all of our work, we’re trying to bring those things out of the shadows and into the center of the narrative. And you know, it’s not lost on me, of course, that I’m speaking about history in the state that tried to ban my work from the classroom.
“When you pass a law like that, what you’re really trying to do is restrict our imagination. You’re trying to restrict the way that we can collectively understand our country more holistically, so that we can imagine a different future.”
Weber on the state’s ecological and racial legacy: “Iowa is the No. 1 altered land mass in the U.S. We have less than 1% of native prairie, and we’re also consistently ranked in the top three states when you’re talking about Black and white discrepancies in the prison population. So when I think of history, I think of trauma – trauma on the land and trauma on the body. I’ve got a whole row of homeboys here who have probably been listening to the same thing for 10 years, because I can’t get it out of my head.
Moore on being biracial in Iowa: “I got two different experiences. I’ve always felt like it’s home, but I don’t know if I belong. It feels like a home that you go to, and you’ve got a mean relative. You still want to go home because there’s some good experiences there, but you know, you’ve got someone who’s not good. I’ve just kept a lot of things to myself over the years.”
Hannah-Jones on the value of dialogue: “This type of conversation and openness is actually stimulating and spiritually affirming. Even when it feels a little uncomfortable, because we’re being very candid, you still feel the willingness to embrace that and take it in, and that’s so meaningful.
“I hope that you don’t leave the energy at the door, that you carry it outside of theory and realize that collectively we have tremendous power to build a different world than what we have. Everything we see in our society that we don’t like, everything that we see is unfair — that’s been constructed. That means it can be deconstructed, and we can build something better.”
