Moki Cherry: Communicate, How? Paintings and Tapestries, 1967-1980

Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2021, Softcover, 120 pages, 28 × 23 cm

Contributions by Texts by Evie Ward, John Corbett, Lisa Alvarado, Christina Forrer, Naima Karlsson

Communicate, How? assembles a selection of Moki Cherry’s most significant works, all of them drawn from the schoolhouse in Sweden where the family archives still reside. These include major tapestries that were used in performance and several that functioned as announcements for Organic Music Society events or other performances. Among these is a banner from the first gig for which Moki made a tapestry, as well as a marvelous silken marquee for a weekend festival at Ornette Coleman’s loft. A group of modestly scaled paintings, some of them shown in early Swedish exhibitions, suggest Moki’s uninhibited, surrealistic use of imagery, often centering on the female figure. These smaller works offer a key to her later tapestries, showing how she constructed her Thangka-like compositions piecemeal out of iconic fragments. The show also includes a ceiling-hanging soft sculpture that was part of Utopias and Visions, 1871-1981, an exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1971, in which the Cherry family lived in a geodesic dome in the museum for three months; this extraordinary work has not been shown since that time.

This catalogue was produced on the occasion of the exhibition

Moki Cherry
Communicate, How?: Paintings and Tapestries, 1967 – 1980
September 3, 2021 – October 9, 2021