Moses Sun is a North Carolina-born, Seattle-based multi-disciplinary artist. Sun is an afro-abstractionist working in assemblage, painting, video, animation, and public murals that explore Pan-Africanism and the world's Diasporas. His search for common ground between diasporic communities has led to collaborations with Seattle's Wing Luke Museum, Frye Art Museum, Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle Hebrew Academy, Bethany Presbyterian Church, and Africatown Plaza. As a founding member of the Vivid Matter Collective (VMC), Sun created the letter "M" of the Black Lives Matter street mural in Seattle and co-curates the VMC gallery. He curated "Hollaback to the Future: Afrofuturist Dimensions vol.1, a Pan-African exhibition celebrating the diverse voices of the African Diaspora, at the Museum of Museums.
He credits his Southern activist upbringing and the experience of living and working in Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Helsinki, Finland, with envisioning a better world through artistic collaboration. He attended high school at The University of North Carolina School of Arts and continued his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Moses Sun Artist’s Statement
My work expresses blackness across multiple media platforms, laying bare my personal history, and humanity. I make drawings on paper and iPad, digital and analogue photographs, sculpture, and installations, then sample them and in the hip-hop ethos of "grinding" output them as relief sculptures, digital prints, video animations, games, and social media apps. I work intuitively, letting go of pretense so that the story reveals to the viewer an entry point, a beginning but never an end.
An exchange between my ancestors and I occurs with each studio session, breeding a ferocious need to visualize the connections I see between cultures and belief. My work bears witness to my struggle to make sense of an inhumane world. The weight of years of chaotic personal, political, and social change has helped me to understand that much of my work is a visual meditation, searching for meaning when words fail.