“Watching Black folks stand up for one another –not with shame, but with clarity and precision– was beautiful. That brawl wasn’t just a reaction; it was inherited muscle memory. Both pieces say: we’ve been defiant, we are defiant, and we’re allowed to look good doing it.”

Some of the most successful exhibitions at his namesake Market Street gallery have been ones that mean the most to him personally, Moore said.

That’s how it is with “To Be Seen,” which opened for Pride Month and is on view through August 16. Moore has been thinking about it since just a few months after he opened the gallery in March 2023. The artists in the show are Black and queer, and the title, Moore said, comes in the opposite of what he was often told to do, by people who wanted him to tone down who he is as a way to protect him.

“I wanted to show to be the antithesis of that,” he said over tea at a downtown café near the gallery. “I think after Trump went into office, we’ve seen the fallout of all the things he’s done since January. I was not interested in not being visible and having my artists not be visible.”

Along with Bey’s work, the show also includes photos by Lulu Mhlana and Eric Hart Jr., portraits by Mayowa Nwadike , paper constructions painted in shellac ink and watercolor by Khari Johnson-Ricks, and a sculpture by San Francisco artist Ramekon O’arwisters .

Black experience through sculpture
O’arwisters describes himself as “over the moon” to be part of “To Be Seen,” saying he’s glad to be able to express the Black queer experience through sculpture. The base of his piece “Black On Black #3” is made of broken ceramics, which O’arwisters likes to use in his work.

“Most ceramicists make vessels, and we are vessels,” he said. “Sometimes we are damaged or broken, but we don’t want to be thrown away. My philosophy is you’re just as beautiful as a complete vessel as you are if you’re broken, or as you get older, we’re just as beautiful, even though society doesn’t treat us that way. So, I use the broken ceramics as a stand in for the human body.”

The sculpture also contains zip-ties, black leather, rings and metal clamps, which reference restraining and restricting.

“That’s my stand-in for how the globe feels,” O’arwisters said. “Politically, economically, socially and environmentally, we’re all are feeling very uptight and restricted and controlled right now.”

This combination of materials is something Moore likes about O’arwisters’s work.  

“I’ve followed Ramekon’s career for quite some time, and I love it because how he describes it to me is often how I feel like sometimes people view Black men,” Moore said. “The piece has zip-ties on the exterior of it, but on the inside it’s leather, right? So, there’s soft versus hard, and inside of those leather balls in that piece, there’s a lot of fabric. There’s so much that’s on the inside of that work, which is symbolic for how we are as individuals.”

The June opening of the show was packed, with many people taking selfies in front of Bey’s work, laughing, and stroking the artwork’s faux-fur. Asked about people’s reaction, Bey says she likes seeing people take joy from her work.

“They were escaping Earth for a minute,” she wrote. “My materials are plush, shiny, exaggerated on purpose; they’re tactile invitations. When people start posing or giggling or petting the fur, it means they’ve already crossed through the portal.”

Moore says one of the things that makes Bey’s pieces so interesting is that she asks queer Black people to pose for them.

“She did an open casting call for individuals to come in, and she told them to dress however they wanted,” he said. “So how they appear in those images, outside of having, you know, multiple limbs, is how they were dressed and how they posed.”

Bey says she does this so the work reflects who it’s for.

“Open casting gives me access to people who aren’t necessarily models, but who are perfect because they bring their own stories, style, and energy,” she wrote. “These aren’t passive subjects, they’re collaborators.”