In Pursuit of Home

Curated by Dexter Wimberly

What does it mean to claim a place, to cross the threshold and call it yours? For many Americans now in their twenties and thirties, the notion of owning a home hovers at the edge of fiction, eroded by wage stagnation, student-loan debt, and a housing market whose prices soar faster than salaries. For Black Americans, that dream has never been simply economic; it is shadowed by a long history of state-sanctioned exclusion from the redlining maps of the 1930s to the subprime lending traps of the 2000s that deliberately severed Black families from this primary engine of generational wealth.

Mario Moore situates this fraught terrain at the center of In Pursuit of Home. Through meticulously rendered paintings, graphite drawings, and bronze sculptures, Moore probes the architecture, literal and symbolic, that dictates who is granted stability and who must improvise it. Domestic interiors flicker between sanctuary and surveillance; verdant backyards become contested ground; figures at rest appear both protected and precarious, their ease hard-won. The artist's Detroit roots surface in layered references to labor and land.

Mario Moore, a Detroit native, earned a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI, in 2009 and an MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT, in 2013. Moore weaves stories about his surroundings and examines the nature of the past and present through history, art, politics, and literature to create his works. He is a recent Kresge Arts Fellow (2023), awarded by the Kresge Foundation, and received the esteemed Princeton Hodder Fellowship (2018–2019) from Princeton University. He has also been awarded residencies at Duke University, the Josef and Annie Albers Foundation, Fountainhead, and Knox College.

Moore's work is included in the permanent collections at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Princeton University Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Mott-Warsh Collection, Louisiana State University Museum of Art, California African American Museum, Flint Institute of Art, and The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Moore's work has been widely exhibited, including at The Detroit Institute of Arts; The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University; the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago; Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI; David Klein Gallery in Detroit; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles; Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Colby College Museum of Art; and the traveling Smithsonian Sites Exhibition, Men of Change.

Dexter Wimberly is an American curator based in Japan who has organized exhibitions at galleries and institutions around the world, including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; The Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, Texas; The Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte, North Carolina; KOKI Arts and STANDING PINE in Tokyo, Japan; BODE in Berlin, Germany; Lehmann Maupin in London, U.K.; SECCI in Milan, Italy; and The Third Line in Dubai, UAE. His exhibitions have been reviewed and featured in publications like The New York Times and Artforum, and have received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Kinkade Family Foundation. In 2023, Wimberly participated in Hauser & Wirth’s International Curatorial Residency Symposium in Somerset, England.

Wimberly has been profiled in Elle Decor and Artnet News. He is a Senior Critic at the New York Academy of Art and the founder and director of the Hayama Artist Residency in Japan.