Elissa Blount Moorhead
Baltimore, MD
Elissa Blount Moorhead is an artist and producer exploring the poetics of quotidian Black life, to emphasize gestural dialectics of quiet domesticity and community building. The artist dwells in both immutable Black culture and the impermanence of its physical manifestations. Moorhead has created public art, exhibitions, and cultural programs for the last 25 years. She is currently a principal partner at TNEG film studios, with Arthur Jafa and Malik Sayeed. TNEG asserts that a cinema calibrated to the cultural, socioeconomic, and Elisexistential particulars of Black being is not only possible but inescapably the way forward toward a viable Black cinema.
Moorhead co-founded Red Clay Arts in NYC. She has co-produced and curated over 20 exhibitions and multimedia projects including Random Occurrences; Cat Calls (Street Harassment project); Practicum; FunkGodJazzMedicine; and Art in Odd Places. She was awarded the USA Artist Fellowship, Saul Zaentz Innovation Fellowship, Ford Foundation /Just Films/Rockwood Fellowship and Ruby Award. She is currently producing a documentary film on Gil Scott-Heron and a projection installation called As of A Now. She is the author of P is for Pussy, an illustrated “children’s” book and is featured in the new anthology How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance due out in March 2019.
As of a Now
Elissa Blount Moorhead is an artist and producer exploring the poetics of quotidian Black life to emphasize gestural dialectics of quiet domesticity and community building.
Artist BioAs of a Now (AOAN) is an x-ray film projection installation which is 3D-mapped onto a vacant row house, using audiovisual narratives, oral histories, augmented reality, and artifacts which reference its former Black denizens and the building’s cultural memo.