Donald Moffett first gained renown as an artist in the 1980s, when he was responding to a crisis that was frustrating researchers, polarizing lawmakers and threatening lives around the world. More than three decades later, he is still doing exactly that.
The causes, however, have changed. Fiercely dedicated to fighting the AIDS epidemic then, Mr. Moffett is battling climate change now.
“The activisms of both rely on science as ally and protagonist in the struggle,” Mr. Moffett wrote in an email after a recent interview at his studio in Staten Island. “And both activisms faced or face a similar political resistance of knuckleheads as the prime antagonists.”
Mr. Moffett, 64, has never been shy about letting you know who he thinks those knuckleheads are. What may be his most famous creation, the 1987 lithograph “He Kills Me,” features an orange-and-black target symbol next to a black-and-white photograph of a simpering Ronald Reagan; the title words are emblazoned in orange capitals beneath the president’s face. Marching AIDS activists used to carry posters of the piece, which is now in the collections of five major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today, a large sticker that he designed, which Mr. Moffett calls a “naughty little work,” is on his studio wall. Equally searing, it has a blue background and huge white capital letters that read, “Break His Little Twitter Finger.” Mr. Moffett, who had the piece pasted around New York, signed it with the words “Unhinged Homos,” referring to gay men, like him, who object to President Trump’s policies. “It’s a little meanspirited,” he said with a chuckle.
Neither work, however, looks remotely like the art Mr. Moffett has destined for his new show, “ILL (nature paintings),” which will open on Nov. 7 at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea. Abstract, sculptural and sometimes huge, these paintings — and the artist insists on that term — began as digital designs. They were then cut out of one or more layers of wood, covered with paint and coated with a resin that is sometimes so glossy that the results appear almost succulent. Incorporating holes and curves and occasionally edged with tiny spikes, the shapes can evoke anything from Hindu symbols to paramecia. But they carry as much of a message as any of his other art.
“The language within the gallery is a special language,” said Mr. Moffett, who lives in Manhattan with his longtime partner, the artist Robert Gober. “It can involve irony in a serious way — and humor — but still make significant points.” When he created posters of “He Kills Me,” which he initially pasted to New York buildings in the middle of the night, he was making art that shouted. This is also true of “Think Science,” a billboard in Lexington, Ky., that he created last year for the organization For Freedoms, whose 50 State Initiative enlisted artists nationwide to make public works encouraging civic engagement.
