Moe Brooker facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Moe Brooker
Born	(1940-09-24)September 24, 1940 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	January 9, 2022(2022-01-09) (aged 81)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Tyler School of Art, Temple University
Known for	Painter, printmaker, teacher
Spouse(s)	Cheryl McClenney-Brooker

Moe Albert Brooker (born September 24, 1940 – died January 9, 2022) was an amazing African American artist. He was a painter, teacher, and printmaker. Moe Brooker created abstract art, which means his paintings didn't show real-life objects exactly. Instead, he used bright colors, lines, stripes, and shapes like squares and circles. His art often felt like lively jazz music. Moe Brooker was famous around the world, and his paintings are in many big museums and art places.

Early Life and Art Education

Moe Brooker was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 24, 1940. His father, Mack Henry Brooker Sr., was a minister. His mother, Lumisher E. Brooker, was a community leader. Moe was named after a family friend who died in World War II. His father moved from South Carolina to Philadelphia. He earned a degree in theology from Temple University. He also worked as a mechanic to support his seven children.

Moe grew up in South Philadelphia. He used to stutter as a child. He overcame this when he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). He finished high school in South Philadelphia. Then, he received a scholarship to attend PAFA in 1959. He studied there until 1963 and earned a certificate in painting.

Other Black students, like Louis B. Sloan and Raymond Saunders, had attended PAFA before him. They told Moe and other new Black students how to succeed. They advised them to work hard and win travel scholarships. Both Sloan and Saunders had won scholarships to travel to Europe. Saunders also told Moe to go to graduate school. This way, he could teach, earn a living, and paint every day.

Moe Brooker was also inspired by Morris Blackburn. Blackburn had studied at PAFA in the 1920s. He showed Moe the art of Dox Thrash and Charles Pridgen. Pridgen used Cubism in his art. An example is his 1950 painting “The Blues.” This painting is now in the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

While at PAFA, Moe often visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There, he saw Julius Bloch’s painting “Stevedore.” It was the first positive picture of a Black man he had ever seen. This painting influenced him a lot. He was also inspired by Rembrandt’s realistic paintings of Africans. Moe saw these during his trips to the Netherlands.

In 1962, Moe Brooker won the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Traveling Scholarship. This was the same scholarship Saunders had won in 1956. After getting his certificate from PAFA in 1963, Moe joined the Army. He spent a year in Korea from 1964 to 1965. In Korea, he saw a funeral procession with very bright colors. This experience left a strong impression on him.

After the Army, Moe enrolled at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1970. He then got his master's degree in fine arts in 1972. As a graduate student, he taught silkscreen printing at the Brandywine Workshop. This helped him become a better printmaker and teacher. He later returned to Brandywine to create more prints. He also spent a year studying in Rome from 1968 to 1969.

How His Art Style Changed

Moe was the youngest of several children in his family. All of them could draw. As a child, he didn't draw simple "lollipop" trees like other kids. His trees had branches, and his people had arms, fingers, and faces. He always wanted to be an artist. His father, however, tried to convince him to do something else. When he was about 11 or 12, he drew Batman, Captain Marvel, and Green Hornet on the sidewalks with chalk. After school, he spent time at St. Martha's House, a community center. There, he loved taking art classes.

His family members also influenced him. He copied drawings by his older brothers and sisters. He loved the style of his brother Mitch Avery, a jazz pianist. He also admired the patterns and colors in his grandmother's handmade quilts.

Brooker's first artworks were figurative. This means they showed real people or objects. His subjects often came from church. He painted people in the pews, men falling asleep, young couples, grandmothers, and women shouting.

He wasn't taught about color in his art classes. So, he decided to learn about it on his own. He found books by the Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky. He started experimenting with colors. In the mid-1970s, he was painting semi-abstract works. He was teaching at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill at the time. He felt stuck for a while. But a trip back to Philadelphia gave him new energy. He traveled often between Chapel Hill and Philadelphia, where his family lived.

While driving through Philadelphia, he saw graffiti on buildings. These were abstract drawings of shapes, colors, and letters. They seemed to burst with energy. He saw pride and anger in these works. He started to put those feelings into his own art. He also added lines to connect different parts of his paintings. By the late 1970s, he began to find his unique artistic voice.

Moe explained that color was like energy. He saw it in a minister's preaching and a gospel choir's singing. He started to connect graffiti to music, which was a big part of his life. He understood how music was structured. He began to use this structure in his paintings.

“The point about abstraction is you develop your own language. Language becomes pretty important to me. Why?  The mystery of language is that it’s 26 letters and yet from those letters because you can combine and re-combine them you can make an infinite number of words. I think the same thing about the elements you use in terms of making drawings. Line, point, shape, value, color, form. You can take and begin to use them in new ways each time and then create something new and something different.”

It took him seven years to fully become a professional abstract artist. He sold his first abstract painting, “A Struggle to be,” to a gallery in Shaker Heights, Ohio. This gallery, called Malcolm Brown Gallery, was Black-owned. It often showed and sold art by African American artists.

While teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Moe Brooker won first prize. This was for his painting “Afternoon Delight II” in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual May Show in 1978. He won again in 1981. In 1985, he won the Cleveland Arts Prize.

This award led to a show at the Robert L. Kidd Associates, Inc. Galleries in Birmingham, Michigan. All of his artworks sold out there, and his prices went up. One reviewer wrote, “If jazz could be expressed in purely visual terms, it might look like Brooker’s works – a series of improvisations laid over a recognizable structure.” Another person noted that his painting titles were full of wisdom. Examples include “Slow Motion Monday” and “What goes round comes round.”

Brooker created mixed-media artworks on canvas and paper. He used acrylics, oils, oil sticks, and encaustic. Encaustic is an ancient Egyptian art method that mixes hot wax with color. As a printmaker, he worked on a year-long project. This was at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1987. He created silkscreen prints. His works and those of five other artists were shown in an exhibit called “Painters Make Prints.”

Brooker signed his artworks with the letters “TTGG.” This stood for “To the Glory of God.” It was similar to how Johann Sebastian Bach signed his music “S. D. G.” This Latin phrase means “to the Glory of God alone.”

Art and Teaching Careers

Moe Brooker was a well-known teacher both in the U.S. and internationally. After graduate school in 1972, he taught at Tyler for one year. In 1974, he became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The next year, he was hired as an associate professor at the University of North Carolina. He showed his art in faculty shows and other exhibits at both schools.

In 1978, he started teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He was an associate professor in painting and drawing. He stayed there until 1985. He was the first Black faculty member at the institute. Again, he showed his art in faculty shows and museums. He was also asked to create artwork for the new Hough Branch Library in Cleveland. He had a solo show at the institute in 1978. This is where he won the art prizes from the Cleveland Museum of Art.

In 1985, he got married and moved back to Philadelphia. He was hired to teach at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1986, his art was shown in an exhibit in China. This was part of an art exchange between the Cheltenham Center for the Arts in Pennsylvania and Chinese art schools. A year later, he was one of three artists who received a two-month grant. They taught at the Tianjin Academy and traveled across China. The City of Philadelphia sponsored this grant.

After returning to the United States, the three artists gave a talk about their trip. This was at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. The artworks they created in China and afterward were displayed at the Nexus Foundation for Today's Art. Moe also showed some of these works at the Malcolm Brown Gallery in Ohio.

In 1990, Moe Brooker became the chair of the Foundation program at the Parsons School of Design in New York. He stayed there until 1994. In 1995, he joined the Moore College of Art and Design. He started as a teacher and then became chair of its Foundations program. He traveled across the country to review student portfolios. He also recruited high school students for the school. In 2011, he received the Penny and Bob Fox Distinguished Professorship at Moore. This was the school's first special teaching position. Moe Brooker retired from Moore in 2012.

Brooker also led workshops at several art colonies. These included the Mississippi Art Colony in 1996 and the Tougaloo Art Colony in 2004.

Moe Brooker was also a mentor to many artists. In 2004, he showed his abstract paintings in an exhibit. Thirteen other artists, whom he had been mentoring, also showed their works. This show was held at the Atelier Fine Art Gallery in Frenchtown, New Jersey.

Helping the Arts Community

Brooker was a member of the Philadelphia Art Commission during two important times. In 2006, the commission decided whether to return the “Rocky” statue to the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Brooker did not want it moved back. He called the statue, which was used in Sylvester Stallone's 1976 “Rocky” movie, a prop and not real art. The commission voted to place it near the museum steps.

In 2009, he was chairman of a committee. They were looking at designs for a new building for the Barnes Foundation. There had been a long legal battle about moving the art collection. It was moved from Merion, Pennsylvania, to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. A new building was built there, and the Barnes collection was moved.

In 1992, he was on a committee to choose artwork for the new Pennsylvania Convention Center. In 2017, he was asked to create a painting for the center. He titled it “Amazing Grace.” His painting “Everything Is On Its Way To Somewhere” was chosen to hang at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia in 2006.

Member of Recherche

Brooker was part of a group of Black artists called Recherche. This French word means “intensely sought-after, choice, rare.” The group started in 1983 after an exhibit of Black artists. The founders were Syd Carpenter, James Dupree, Carolyn Hayward-Jackson, Richard Jordan, Charles Searles, Hubert C. Taylor, and Andrew Turner. Leroy Johnson joined in 1993.

The group wanted to show that Black artists worked in many different styles. They wanted to prove that there was no single "Black artist" style. They also wanted to encourage young artists of color. Recherche was formed because Black artists were often left out of art shows. The members worked together to organize their own exhibits and projects.

Brooker traveled with Recherche to Brazil in 1989. They exhibited art and celebrated 100 years since Brazil ended slavery. They also went to Denmark in 1986. The Danish artists later visited Philadelphia for an exhibit. Recherche members held exhibits in Dallas in 1991. They also showed art at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Moore College of Art & Design, and Hampton University Museum.

Art Projects and Shows

In 2014, Moe Brooker received a big project. He was asked to create windows for an elevator tower. This was for the Long Island Rail Road building in Wyandanch, New York. He made 12 stained-glass windows. Each was 10 feet tall and 7 feet wide, with an abstract design. The Pennsylvania Convention Center also asked him to create a huge painting. It was shown for the first time in April 2021.

Brooker also made a special poster for the Odunde Festival in 1995. This poster helped raise money for the festival. He also worked on a project to bring art to people. He made posters that were put up at city bus stops. His poster was called “Open Secret.” In 1992, he was also asked to create an advertisement for Absolut Vodka.

In the mid-1980s, he worked at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. In 2011, he designed a fabric scarf for their exhibit. The exhibit was called “Close at Hand: Philadelphia Artists from the Permanent Collection.”

In 1971, his art was in an exhibit called “Young, Gifted and Black.” This was at the Philadelphia Recreation Department's Lee Cultural Center. One of his abstract paintings won first prize. The show aimed to highlight talented young Black artists in the Delaware Valley. These artists often found it hard to show their work to the public.

Death

Moe Brooker passed away on January 9, 2022.

Selected Awards

• James Van Der Zee Lifetime Achievement Award, Brandywine Workshop, 2003
• Conrad Nelson Fellowship, Millersville University, 2004
• Artists of the City Award, Painted Bride Art Center, 2008
• Medal of Achievement, Philadelphia Art Alliance, 2009
• Artist of the Year Award (Hazlett Memorial Award), from Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, 2010
• Artists Equity Award, 2010
• Honoree, African American Museum in Philadelphia, 35th anniversary celebration, 2011

Selected Collections

Selected Exhibitions