Moe Brooker Interview, 13 January 2009

Abstract

Artist Moe Brooker discusses his life and career. A native of Philadelphia, Brooker came to Cleveland in 1979 to teach at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he became its first full-time African American instructor. Shortly after arriving in Cleveland, Brooker won top honors at the prestigious May Show at the Cleveland Museum of Art, overcoming the common perception that no black artist could win the show. The artist describes his own artistic education and development from his early interest in drawing comic book figures through his education in Philadelphia public schools and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as well as study abroad in Rome and Paris. Brooker discusses his interest in and insights on jazz and its impact on his visual art. Brooker describes Cleveland as he experienced it in the 1970s and 1980s and credits the city and its arts culture for fostering his artistic development. The artist speaks candidly about the relationship of art and race, protesting the label "African American art" as a "ludicrous and unimportant" distinction. This interview was conducted by telephone.

Interviewee

Brooker, Moe (interviewee)

Interviewer

Busta, William (interviewer)

Project

Cleveland Artists Foundation

Date

1-13-2009

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

63 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Moe Brooker Interview, 13 January 2009" (2009). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 901028.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/210

Related Resources

Each in Their Own Voice: African American Artists in Cleveland, 1970-2005 @ Cleveland Voices

Transcript

Moe Brooker [00:00:06] Hello?

William Busta [00:00:08] Hello, Moe. This is Bill Busta. 

Moe Brooker [00:00:10] Bill, how are you?

William Busta [00:00:12] How are you? We’re at- We’re on the phone right now, obviously, but we’re being recorded right now that we’ll have a little bit of introductory material.

Moe Brooker [00:00:24] All right.

William Busta [00:00:26] Okay.

Moe Brooker [00:00:27] All right, so what do we do here?

William Busta [00:00:28] Okay, let me. We’re closing the door, so we’re going to be okay. As I told you, I wear a few different hats and work on different projects, and I appreciate your willingness to be recorded for this oral history project at Cleveland State University. But let me start out with talking. I’m going to- There’s some questions that I ask of all the artists and others that I just- I start out formally, but most of them sort of happen as I go along.

Moe Brooker [00:01:06] Okay, that’s good.

William Busta [00:01:08] And let me start with this question. It’s one of those curiosities about artists. When did you first realize that you had artistic ability? Or when did you first start to think that you might be an artist?

Moe Brooker [00:01:26] I don’t ever think it was when I started to. I mean, it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to be. I had six brothers and one sister, and all could draw extremely well. And being the youngest in the family, it was just a question that I was following or imitating my older siblings. But after a certain point, most of them lost interest. I never did. The interest remained as it still is. I mean, my parents wanted me to do something else, but that’s not what I wanted to do in terms of my life. I have always wanted to be an artist. Nothing else. Nothing else except the making of art.

William Busta [00:02:13] So you were drawing in kindergarten?

Moe Brooker [00:02:16] I was drawing in kindergarten. I could draw better than most of the kids in kindergarten because I had the luxury of my siblings. So I didn’t draw lollipop trees. I drew trees with branches. And in some cases, some teachers didn’t believe I was doing the drawing. But, you know, I have always wanted to be an artist.

William Busta [00:02:58] One of the things that happens with, I think, young people who are. Who start to draw is that there’s obviously many different ways to draw. But one of the things that children tend to do is they tend to draw ideas of things. In other words, almost a pictogram of a house or a pictogram of their mother. And there’s the other thing of actually drawing a house, of looking at a house and drawing it, or looking at a tree and drawing it. Did you have those sort when you started?

Moe Brooker [00:03:30] No, I drew a house and I drew trees. I Didn’t do pictographs. I didn’t do, you know, what evil children drew. I. I had these older siblings. They were older than I, and consequently, I would attempt to imitate what they were drawing, and they. My oldest brother is considerably older than I am. And so I wasn’t interested in doing the kind of drawings that I sought to do. I was interested in doing drawings like my siblings. And so, consequently, I would draw. As I said, I’d draw trees with branches, not lollipop trees. I drew people with arms and fingers and faces. I mean, I didn’t draw the way a lot of kids drew.

William Busta [00:04:29] Where were you born, Moe?

Moe Brooker [00:04:31] I was born in Philadelphia.

William Busta [00:04:32] Philadelphia. And that was. What year was that?

Moe Brooker [00:04:35] 1940.

William Busta [00:04:36] 1940. And when did you start formal art training? Did you start to take classes at any time, or was it part of school?

Moe Brooker [00:04:52] No, I think things are quite different today than when I grew up. There was a place called St. Martha’s House, and it was a cultural center that had different kinds of things that they would offer kids to do. You could learn to tap dance. You could learn to play an instrument. You could learn to be an actor. You could join a club. I always gravitated toward the art room, and it wasn’t something that was formal, but I always gravitated toward the art room. And there was always someone there who would help you in doing things. But most of my instruction came a great deal out of drawing from comic books. I would draw all the superheroes at the time. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, the Green Hornet. Those characters I would attempt to imitate as to draw. So it wasn’t a question of lessons, as many kids do today, but just you were in an environment, you were in a situation which offered some information, and you would take that information and begin to use it. So much so that a number of us kids would draw in the street with chalk, and we would have contests in terms of who could draw the best Superman or who could draw the best Batman or who could draw the best superhero. And it was done with chalk on the asphalt in the street.

William Busta [00:06:45] That’s incredible. And was it because the superheroes were some way that obviously, boys that age sort of are supposed to. So the superheroes are designed to appeal, were designed to appeal to boys of that age. But was it also- Was it just that, or was it also because of the use of line in comic books?

Moe Brooker [00:07:10] Well, I think the figures themselves, the character themselves, Seem to make it easy to perceive how they were constructed. And so you could look at the heavy outline, and you could look at the way knees were made and casts were made and hands were made. And after a certain point, you look pretty good. I mean, there were a lot of kids who were insulated better than I, you know, and you could really draw those figures. And the interesting thing is that what you learn is if it doesn’t go beyond that, and after a while you learn that the imitation of a figure is not really the same as the creation of a figure or an object by observation. And you kind of learn that there’s a real difference. But then it happened after I had gotten into school.

William Busta [00:08:16] And you take any art classes in high school, or was it-

Moe Brooker [00:08:20] Oh, high school, yes, absolutely. I went to a high school, South Philadelphia High School, that produced a large number of students who would either go to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, what used to be called the Museum School, which is now the University of the Arts, or to Tyler Temple University. And I went to- Initially, I went from high school. I went to the academy. Interesting thing is that I had a really wonderful art teacher in high school, Mr. Feldman, that I still revere and I still am so thankful to him. Because it’s at that point that I began to get really solid instruction in terms of how to construct a figure. Not to draw outlines, but to draw mass and to understand the relationship of form. And happened to be. And a lot of that came out of that high school class. And I was an art major in high school.

William Busta [00:09:39] And you could be in your high school. You could be an art major then. That’s unusual.

Moe Brooker [00:09:45] Oh, yeah. In high school, you could. In junior high, which I imagine is now called middle school, in junior high you might have one or two classes a week in terms of art. And an interesting thing is that I had a teacher in junior high school, Mrs. Zalot, and she was someone who dealt a great deal with design concepts, which I liked a great deal, which later on began to make a lot of sense to me, just as I began to move from working figuratively years later into abstraction. But after, in graduate school, when I was a graduate assistant, I was teaching night classes at Tyler, who walked into my class, who walked into my class with my former junior high school teacher. And that was interesting.

William Busta [00:10:44] That’s fun. And where did you go to art school?

Moe Brooker [00:10:49] I went to the Chesterton Academy of the Fine Arts first.

William Busta [00:10:52] Okay, let me set a pace.

Moe Brooker [00:10:55] That really set the pace for me because I was instructed on a very classical basis doing. What do you call it? Doing cast drawings and life drawings and portraiture and construction drawings and painting. And learning really the technical issues of paint, you know, which I found very useful and to this day find very, very useful and very exciting and very helpful in terms of decisions that I make relative to painting from the academy, an interesting thing happened. I was drafted into the army after the academy and spent a year in the States and then spent a year in Korea. And up until that time, I had worked probably the color was very drab and very academic. Color was not an issue. It was mostly value that one does when you work, I think, in the academy tradition. But I went to Korea and I saw something that became very curious to me, and that was I saw a Korean funeral. And what I was struck by was very different from the United States, where everyone wears kind of dark and black at their funeral. They had these wonderful bright and exciting colors. And it struck me, and I began to develop a real interest in color. And then when I came out of the Army, I went to graduate school at Tyler, and my thesis was, in fact, on color. And my thesis was written sort of in answer to, but with some disagreement with Albers. His color system is based on inactive shapes.

William Busta [00:13:26] Yes.

Moe Brooker [00:13:26] Now, the shapes must be neutral. The shapes must be, you know, pretty much unanimated, without curves, in order for many of the effects for him in his system to work. And I wrote in my thesis, challenging somewhat that by saying that when the introduction of the curve went into the system, some out the effects no longer work.

William Busta [00:13:59] When was- When were you at Tyler? When were you-

Moe Brooker [00:14:06] I was at Tyler in 19. Let me see, 1970–72 for graduate school. And I spent a year in Rome because they have a school in Rome.

William Busta [00:14:22] Right.

Moe Brooker [00:14:23] And so I spent a year in Rome at this school.

William Busta [00:14:30] Was Don Harvey there during the years that you were at Tyler?

Moe Brooker [00:14:36] Did I do what?

William Busta [00:14:37] I said was Don Harvey there at any of the time when you were at Tyler? I know that he went to Tyler in the early to mid-’70s.

Moe Brooker [00:14:48] He came after me. I finished graduate school in ’72.

William Busta [00:14:52] Okay, so he must have been a little later.

Moe Brooker [00:14:54] Yes, he was.

William Busta [00:14:59] How did the circumstances come about to coming to Cleveland to teach at the Cleveland Institute of Art?

Moe Brooker [00:15:09] I had been teaching in the South. I taught at the University of Virginia for a bit and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And at the time my wife’s father passed and she wanted to get back to Philadelphia. So after being there for only about a couple of years, we came back and I taught a couple of night schools or night courses with Tyler. I got into town and I saw David Pisa at an opening, he asked me what was I doing. And I said absolutely nothing. And he said, like you to teach a course. So I started doing that. Then one day, miraculously, and I found out later on how this happened, but I got a call, I got a call from Bob Weitzel, who was at the time the Dean, and he invited me to submit slides and resume, et cetera, to the Institute for consideration of teaching. It seemed to come out of the blue to me. But what I learned later on is that a good friend in painter who just recently passed, Edna Andrade, who was sort of in that second wave of painters like Anderskevich and a few others that came sort of the optical painters who came after the response why happened in at the Modern, had called Bob and asked and suggested that I might be somebody who would be interested in working at Cleveland. Now that came about because Edna tried, wanted me to teach at the Museum School or the University of the Arts and they didn’t have a full time job and so I didn’t want to take up a part-time job. And she had called, she had called Bob and Bob then called me and I sent my slides and stuff up there and then subsequently went out for an interview. And when I was there for the interview, I think Tyrell was there and Frank, I can’t think of Frank’s last name was there, but all the old guard was there. And so, you know, I walked in, I walked in and I’m not quite sure what they expected, but we started talking and they asked me who were some of my teachers. And so the people that I mentioned from the Academy are people that they knew like Franklin Watkins, Julius Block, Walter Stuempfig. So they knew them and they also knew many of the people from Tyler, like David Pease. And so that sort of worked in my stead. And I was offered a job and I started in Cleveland.

William Busta [00:18:38] What year Was that?

Moe Brooker [00:18:39] In 1976.

William Busta [00:18:43] One of the things I find interesting about that is that, you know, at the Institute at that time you had Ed Mieczkowski and Julian Stanzek, who were both of course in the Responsive Eye show. And Ann Moskowitz was another graduate of the Institute who was in the Responsive Eyes. So one of the things I would not have imagined was a connection between you and that sort of optical painting school.

Moe Brooker [00:19:21] Well, I don’t think there was a connection in terms of the work, but I know that Edna Andrade, who was part of the obstacle situation, was someone who was very encouraging to me as a young painter. She was very encouraging to me and was very complimentary to me. It would always come to any. Any show that I seemingly would have. I would see Edna at any show that I had in Philadelphia. And so I’m not sure that that’s a direct connection, but I think. I mean, as I understand academic politics now, having been teaching for a long time, I’m sure it must have come up. I’m sure they- It must have been asked who had recommended me. And, you know, Stanzak and Mieczkowski all knew Edna. And so I think that stood in my stead.

William Busta [00:20:26] You were just sort of like to get the end of the parentheses. You left Cleveland? What year was it?

Moe Brooker [00:20:34] I left Cleveland in 1985.

William Busta [00:20:36] 85. So you were teaching about nine years in the city.

Moe Brooker [00:20:39] Nine and a half years, yeah.

William Busta [00:20:44] And just because how. Let’s start. I want to back up just a half a step because we’re going to get to the same questions about Cleveland. Is that as when you were a high school student and you were a child, did you ever? Was the Philadelphia Museum of Art something big in your life or something?

Moe Brooker [00:21:06] Oh, listen, I would go to the museum every Saturday, and I would go to the academy every chance I got. There was a painting at the academy which was significantly important in my life, and it was Death on a Pale Charger, huge painting. And I had remembered it from, I think, when my parents took me to the museum, because my father and mother would take me to the museum, but I didn’t know where it was. And one day, from Ms. Zalot’s class in junior high school, we walked into this building called the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and walked up the steps and over to the right was this magnificently wonderful painting, very inspirational for me. And I think a painting that had an enormous impact just in terms of its compositional structure, which I loved, and the way in which a rhythm seemed to move throughout the entire piece. I’m not sure that I understood all of that at that age, but there was something significantly important to me about that payday at a very young age. And so when I went to the academy afterwards, I would go up and look at that painting constantly and make some drawings in terms of its compositional structure and how things related, how things worked and how rhythms tied things together.

William Busta [00:22:45] And when you came to Cleveland, how did the city feel differently than Philadelphia? What was-

Moe Brooker [00:22:58] Cleveland is a Midwest city. It’s not necessarily a walkable city.

William Busta [00:23:03] Right.

Moe Brooker [00:23:04] Philadelphia is a walkable city that has small streets. And so the difference was physical. First of all, I Knew a great deal about Cleveland just based on jazz. And when I first got there, down on Euclid Avenue, they still had a couple of jazz clubs. And the first couple of years that I was there in Cleveland, I went down to 105th and Euclid and went into a couple of jazz clubs and saw some wonderful people. And then all of that began to close and fall apart. Redevelopment began to happen and so that all went away. But the difference was physical. In terms of a physical presence. It wasn’t a walkable city. It was a city that was midwestern. And so the streets were larger. They weren’t as grid oriented as Philadelphia is a very grid oriented city, very clearly a grid. Cleveland has a number of offshoots and twists and turns on a regular basis that Philadelphia doesn’t have. So the difference was that and the other difference was there wasn’t very much of a center city in Philadelphia. There was a real exciting and growing, an active center part of the city where lots of activity took place. And one of the things is, I recall the first night that I was there, I drove into the center of Cleveland and it was empty and I couldn’t believe it. Of course, I found that things happened in other places in Cleveland, but the center city was not a place that one necessarily went to.

William Busta [00:25:03] Right. You mentioned jazz. When did that start being an important part of your life and how did it affect your painting?

Moe Brooker [00:25:16] Jazz, gospel music is all, I think, a part of. You know, the same thing. I mean, jazz is a system of music that comes from polyrhythmic connections and relationships. And what you find is that polyrhythm exists primarily country-wise in Africa. I also dealt with that in my graduate thesis. I like the structure of jazz. My oldest brother is a jazz musician, so I was used to hearing lots of different syncopations and lots of different chordal structures. I play myself. I’m not the greatest musician, but all of us learned to play an instrument of some sort. And I learned to play the piano. I could play CS and loved the sense of improvisation which ultimately began to lead toward my movement into abstraction. Very definitely into abstraction. The sense of spontaneity which is in jazz, which is not an impulsive response which a lot of people think that it is, but it isn’t. Spontaneity in jazz is best I can describe. It is a decision that’s made very quickly based on what’s being heard at any given time, the kind of instrument and your knowledge of the instrument that you’re playing and the choice that you make which has a purpose. I think impulsive response doesn’t have a purpose. And so that’s why a lot of people can’t play jazz. I mean, they can play the notes, but they can’t play. They don’t understand the sense of spontaneity, which is a choice, a decision that’s made with purpose. It’s not just, well, I’ll do this. And in jazz, there’s a conversation going on all the time between the various instruments. And you got to listen to what the other people are playing in order to be able to play with them. And so that sense of relationship, that sense of conversation is one of the same things that I ultimately began to look for in my own work. In terms of abstraction, what is the conversation, the relationship between the various parts? What is the relationship between the various colors that exist? And so I think in that sense, that’s how and what jazz has impacted what I do as an artist.

William Busta [00:28:25] Well, one of the things I’m interested that you said that interests me, it’s a sort of a thread, actually, that’s running through several of the people I’ve talked to today was taking piano lessons. And one of the things from what you said that I’m thinking is that as long as when you’re a child, you think music is about words to some extent, but as soon as you start playing an instrument, it becomes much more of an abstract art form.

Moe Brooker [00:28:59] Well, see, here’s where it’s different. Because in my household, everybody played an instrument. And so from time to time, we would get together and just play. Words were never. Words were about songs, but words wasn’t about music. Music was about sound. From my earliest days and through church and everything else. Church. The church dealt with sound in terms of music. Syncopation, even to the point of hand clapping, syncopation. Words seemed to be there, but they didn’t have the kind of impact. It was sound that was most important, at least as I recall as a child. Not words, not at all.

William Busta [00:29:44] And that actually in some ways prepares, I mean, this is my interpretation certainly prepares for visual art not being about being pictorial, but being about color, being about shape, being about movement.

Moe Brooker [00:29:58] I think so. I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think that’s a clear. I think that’s a clear relationship.

William Busta [00:30:07] When you came to Cleveland, was your artistic style already fully formed or were there things still happening with it?

Moe Brooker [00:30:13] I was in the process of going to a change. I had been very figuratively instructed and still worked kind of semi-figuratively and semi abstractly. But it was always still very, very, very, very much figuratively based. And what began to happen when I got to Cleveland is that two things. One is, I was far enough away from everybody who knew me where I could begin to take chances in terms of my work, because I knew I wanted to make some changes. I knew that sometimes you find yourself in a situation where there are expectations in terms of your work. And I had sort of just started really working in galleries. And, you know, I mean, they were. They were saying to me, I want you to continue to do this. And I didn’t feel like doing that work yet. At the same time, I couldn’t find myself breaking away because it was risking being put out of the gallery, which ultimately happened. But I began to look at other possibilities. I began to look at a couple of things that I had done that I had thought about when I was in Italy, in Rome, and came back to Philadelphia, and began to realize the same sort of thing. And it had to do with walls. The walls in Paris, for example, the walls in Rome are wonderful because you have all these posts that are put on the walls, you have all these announcements and all these various posters that are put on, and as weather begins to work, they begin to. Slowly, slowly they begin to come off and they begin to fall apart. And so what you have is you have a number of just really nice little vignettes of shape. And it struck me, and I did a lot of drawings of those walls. When I came back, what began to happen to me is that graffiti began to impact me. And I looked at a number of walls around the city and began to go around and just kind of look at what was going on on the walls and again began to make drawings, not of the objects or of the things, but just of the connection of the relationships that were sort of going on. And ultimately, it led to my eventually moving toward a greater sense of abstraction. And in order to release myself, I stopped painting in oil, and I started working only in pastel, because I had never worked in pastel before. And so I didn’t have a bias in terms of what pastel was or what it could do or what it couldn’t do. And so it allowed me to begin to make up and use it as I wished. And that in itself was a really big, big release for me. And so the result is that I started working on paper, and I started working in pastel, and I started working with pastel and watercolor and worked for at least a couple of years that way in Cleveland before I then Moved into painting and back into painting. And I think in ’78, when I moved back into painting, I won first prize at the May Show.

William Busta [00:34:32] Right.

Moe Brooker [00:34:35] It was five by seven or five by six, something like that.

William Busta [00:34:41] So Cleveland was one of the places then that. I know that in those early years in Cleveland that your work was recognized fairly early. There was a show at New Gallery that may have been like ’79.

Moe Brooker [00:35:01] Yeah. I think the show at the New Gallery was, in fact, the result of moving back into painting. And Marjorie saw the work at the. You know, saw the work at the May show. And, I mean, Martha called me up and she said, you know, she asked me, was I interested in showing, and I said, where? She said, it’s the New Gallery. So, I mean, at the time, I knew the New Gallery to be a place that everyone wanted to show. I wanted to show there for sure. And so I agreed and we set it up. And I can’t think of Anne’s. I can’t think of Anne’s name. She used to work at the museum.

William Busta [00:35:46] Ann Lockhart.

Moe Brooker [00:35:48] Say again?

William Busta [00:35:49] That may have been it. I don’t know. She was curator of prints and drawings.

Moe Brooker [00:35:55] And she did a catalog on me for that show.

William Busta [00:36:02] I’ll check that.

Moe Brooker [00:36:04] And I think she then went to. I don’t know. She went to someplace out in the Midwest, in Michigan, I think, as a curator. But I guess what I’m saying is that Cleveland was when a major change happened in my work. And I’ve always felt as if it happened because I was in Cleveland and lots of things were sort of going on. And I got to meet a number of people who I found interesting. A guy by the name of Morris. I can’t think of his name. He used to be at the. I don’t know. I think I walked one day into that place that used to be on Euclid Avenue, was a bar, and he and I got into a big discussion politically and then became friends. And he was someone that I would talk to a lot. He subsequently passed through him. I met. What’s his name? Brown. Malcolm Brown.

William Busta [00:37:27] Yes.

Moe Brooker [00:37:28] And, you know, I met him and Ernestine, ultimately. But the show at the New Gallery was the result of, I think, having won the prize at the May Show and having met. I think I had one or two shows there, and then I moved over to DVR.

William Busta [00:37:58] Right. And I remember your show at DVR, but John Moore was talking about how you knew. The two of you knew each other fairly well.

Moe Brooker [00:38:09] Yeah, yeah. I mean, John was a good friend, and he was working at the museum. And I think I met me and Jane. And what I found is that a lot of people wanted to meet me. And at first I didn’t quite understand why, and then I realized why in that the history at the institute was that there had never been an African American who taught there during the day school, the entire history of the school. There had been a couple who had worked at night, Malcolm Brown worked at night, but they had never allowed an African American to teach there during the day. And so I was it. I was the first person to do that. And consequently, I found myself being asked to do a lot of things simply because it seemed to be of some purpose that I was at the Institute. Since I was not from Cleveland. I wasn’t aware of its importance in that sense, in that. I mean, I got to Cleveland and with the exception of John, I met a number of African American and the issue of the NAT show came up and I asked, you know, any of you want to apply things at all? No, not going to apply. And I said, why? Because we won’t win. I said, how do you know that? And they said, oh, no. I mean, no one is ever one who’s been African American. And I said, well, have you ever tried? And they said, no, there’s not even a reason to try. And it just made me angry, you see. And so I said to myself, of course I’m going to try. It’s a show that’s open to everyone. Why not? And I did and won.

William Busta [00:40:11] That’s one of the questions about you teaching in that type of situation. Kevin Everson, who I’ll be talking to later today. Kevin said he wanted to teach at a university rather than an art school, because the art school still don’t have very many African American teachers. And there’s not much chance, he thought, for a dialogue on the type of issues that he wanted to investigate with his work. Go ahead, go ahead.

Moe Brooker [00:40:52] No, no, I mean, I am interested in making visible. I mean, that’s what my work is about, making visible. And that making visible has a great deal to do with who I am. What I am influences perceptions that I have and that I put down on campus or paper or whatever. And so, I don’t know, I just figured that if that place was. First of all, I knew of the Institute and felt very pleased that I had been asked to teach there because it had a great reputation nationally. And so I was delighted to teach there. I wanted to teach at me. I didn’t find out that the political situations were as they were until after I’d been there for a bit. And what I found is the important thing to me was that I became someone to whom a number of minority students could turn when they were having difficulty or when they were having problems. Where in some cases they didn’t feel as if they could go to some of the other teachers. So I felt that that was a very important role that I had to do at the Institute. In fact, in most places that I’ve taught. Because when I started teaching at both the Institute at the University of Virginia, University of North Carolina, I was the only person in my department in both cases. And subsequently when I went to Cleveland, I was the only African American who was teaching there. So I know that in many instances African American students would not approach some faculty members directly about problems that they were having paint wise. And in some cases, faculty members didn’t pay attention to them. And so that became a major issue for me. I mean, that’s what I wanted to do. So I think as long as there were African American students as well as other students, because I like students very much. But I think one of my callings was that I felt I had to- I needed to make response and be available, particularly to African American students.

William Busta [00:43:40] So while you were- Mark Howard was one of your students there?

Moe Brooker [00:43:44] Who?

William Busta [00:43:45] Mark Howard. Do you remember him? Painter or?

Moe Brooker [00:43:50] Curlee Holton was one of my students.

William Busta [00:43:52] Curlee. Okay.

Moe Brooker [00:43:58] Miller Horn was one of my- Miller Horn.

William Busta [00:44:04] So we’ll see both Curly and Miller in the show. Curly had a career that sort of blossomed. He had been an artist for many years. But his experience at the Institute really transformed him into a fine artist from more of an illustrator.

Moe Brooker [00:44:24] I think he and I would fight because I would tell him he’s playing a game and he needs to stop playing the game and get to work.

William Busta [00:44:35] Right.

Moe Brooker [00:44:37] Don’t tell me what you’re going to do. Do it.

William Busta [00:44:42] The relationships that you’ve had with. Do you continue your relationship with Malcolm Brown Gallery?

Moe Brooker [00:44:51] Haven’t shown there probably in about 10 years. Presently, I show here at Cleveland. I mean, here in Philadelphia at the Sandy Webster Gallery. And I show at June Kelly in New York, which I’ve done for about 20 years. And I show at the Robert Roman Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

William Busta [00:45:22] So after a short period of time of becoming less attractive to galleries. If you’ve been at June Kelly for 20 years, it didn’t take long before your work became more attractive? Or don’t you think so?

Moe Brooker [00:45:39] Say that again.

William Busta [00:45:40] Well, you were mentioning when your work changed in the late ’70s, shortly after you came to Cleveland, that there was a gallery or two who became less interested in your work?

Moe Brooker [00:45:54] Because I was going through a change and they didn’t want me to change from what I was doing. And so consequently, I didn’t put out a galleries because they wanted me to continue to do what I was doing. I didn’t want to do that. And so the price was, if you can’t do this, then you need to move on, and that’s fine. I understand that.

William Busta [00:46:24] As you look back at your career, were or was there any obstacles or anything that was in your way from becoming more successful that you wish had been different? Are there forces other than your own than what you can accomplish yourself?

Moe Brooker [00:46:43] I mean, the question of who you are and what you are has always been an obstacle for any African American artist, myself included. For whatever reason, people tend to want to separate what African American artists do as being Black art, which I’m not quite sure what that is. And maybe somebody needs means to tell me what it is, because I’m not quite sure what that is. I know that Black people make art. I know white people make art. I know Asian people make art. I know Indian people make art. What is important is that there is a universal about the making of art which allows one to talk to anyone of any culture. And so, you know, I mean, so much so that, you know, I mean, the old tide story of a number of people during the late 19th century, Picasso being one, Matisse being another, many, many, many who found African sculpture as a major influence and a major source. But the problem is that they would like an African American artist to show in a particular way. In my case, I have been told, and I laugh every time I think about it, I have been told by some people from time to time, well, you don’t paint like an African American artist. And I say, well, what does an African American artist paint like? You know, I mean, what- Can you give me some insight into that in terms of what they are allegedly supposed to paint? And then I ask the next question to follow that up. Give me an instance in terms of what a white artist should be painting and define for me what whiteout happens to be. So I find those labels to be ludicrous, unimportant. I’m interested in doing work that begins to talk to people on a number of levels. And so for some people, that offers a real problem and resulting in some cities it’s changing slightly. But in some cities, some galleries will not show work by African American artists. I mean, I found that in Cleveland When I first got there, I mean, I was told, boy, you’re really lucky that you’re showing at the new gallery. I mean, I would just let that roll because I would tend to get angry if I really thought about it for a while. If it’s about the work, then let it be about the work. And if we’re talking about what the work talks about, then let’s talk about that. But don’t exclude or separate what I do from the mainstream of art. And that is what is the problem is that still African American art is separated from the mainstream as being something different. I really find that offensive, frankly. And I think that who I am has influenced what I do as an African American. Yes. I don’t think that I make Black art. I have no idea what that is. And I think that a number of people in the actual industry itself need to kind of get away from that. And so I think it’s beginning to change somewhat, but slowly, still very slowly.

William Busta [00:50:44] I’ve worked for years on dealing with the issue of what Cleveland art is. And after, like, any question that you keep asking for a number of years, you wind up with some answer eventually. And it became- It sort of appears to me that regional art of any kind, whether it’s Cleveland or anything else, is never defined by the artist. It’s defined by the audience. That the audience decides one or the other. And sometimes they decide correctly and sometimes they decide incorrectly. But this came in a moment when I saw John Pearson, David Davis, Ed Mieczkowski, Julian Stanczak, all doing geometric abstraction, sitting in a room saying their work had nothing to do with each other. And I realized, well, the audience thinks this, but the artist had something very different in mind.

Moe Brooker [00:51:46] Well, sometimes they have something different in mind, and sometimes what they’re saying is not true. I mean, there’s no way in the world that Ed, nor John, nor David could in any way say that what the other was doing had absolutely no influence or impact or shared a common concern. I think to say that is kind of ludicrous to me, and it’s not true. So regional art can be defined by the public, those persons who are in that area. But I think many times artists wish to be known as these great innovative and independent thinkers and make no allowance for anyone who either has influenced them or anyone who has any sort of feelings or in the same direction. So I understand what you’re saying. I think regional art has a face. And that face is in many instances the result of what’s going on and the influences that they are all feeling based on proximity. So it’s, you know, I mean, Ed knows better than that. And so did John Pearson. In fact, they were all part of a particular group at one point.

William Busta [00:53:33] Right.

Moe Brooker [00:53:35] So, you know, I mean, that’s not true. And I know that. And they know it as well.

William Busta [00:53:41] But you know, I was talking about that, but I was also talking about that’s where there’s sort of, some of where there’s issues with being what type of artist you are. Whether African American or color field or- [crosstalk] Audiences tend to try to create-

Moe Brooker [00:54:01] In every city, the issue of African American art remains. It’s not regional, it’s national.

William Busta [00:54:09] Right.

Moe Brooker [00:54:10] I mean, it’s not regional that one defines African American art in the city. It’s defined that way throughout the entire country. So it’s not- I mean, that’s not a part of regionalism. At least I don’t think it is, anyway.

William Busta [00:54:24] No. One of the- Moe, as we’re getting toward the end of our time. And I wondered if there was anything else you wanted to say or you wanted to bring up?

Moe Brooker [00:54:36] Well, I think that Cleveland was a really important place for me. And it was important for me because it allowed me to stretch and open and to explore things that I had thought about for a while but was somewhat reluctant to pursue. And so in that sense, Cleveland remains for me a really important place that I have a great deal of love for the city in terms of people that I met, the organizations that I became a part of, the school itself. People like Martha. People like Deborah- I can’t think of her last name.

William Busta [00:55:27] People like Deborah Ratner?

Moe Brooker [00:55:34] Ernestine Brown.

William Busta [00:55:35] Yes.

Moe Brooker [00:55:36] Malcolm Brown. I mean, it was really important that I be there at that time. It began to open up a number of things for me and cause a number of things to come together for me as an artist. And so I am continually grateful to Cleveland and talk about Cleveland all the time, about what I think of Cleveland and how wonderful I think the art community is and was when I was there and how exciting it was to be in Cleveland when I was there. And that excitement caused me to want to do things. So I’m delighted and excited that I was in Cleveland at that particular time and that good things began to happen. And I think coming out of Cleveland, pretty much my present style began to develop and just continued to grow. But a lot of it is because of Cleveland. And so I will be continually grateful to it. I mean, just people like Toby Lewis, really good things began to happen. There was an interest, there was an excitement. There was a situation where when you had an opening. People came to the opening, and I found the community very supportive of the artists in Cleveland. And so in that sense, I had a wonderful time in Cleveland and continued to reflect and think about and back upon Cleveland in very wonderful ways.

William Busta [00:57:23] Well, on a personal note, for me, when I came back to Cleveland at the end of ’79 and started working here in the art field without knowing a great deal, I learned most of what I know about art from looking rather than academically. And at that time, your work was. Was important to me. You were one of the most important artists in the city, and your work was very important to me and to my education. It’s part of- As you do learn from looking, the pieces that are important, particularly early on, become your standard of how you judge other things and how you know what art was. So to me, that was- I was certainly very young, but I always looked at your work and thought, wow, this hasn’t- And I’ve been looking for it ever since.

Moe Brooker [00:58:24] Well, thank you so much, Bill. I really appreciate that.

William Busta [00:58:29] Well, thank you for the interview, Moe. And I really appreciate your participation.

Moe Brooker [00:58:33] Okay, thanks.

William Busta [00:58:34] Okay, bye. Bye.

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