NOMAD: Dominique Moody and the Assemblage of Home is on view at the Armory Arts Center in Pasadena through January 16, 2027, presented as part of the year-long city celebration marking the centennials of Route 66 and the Colorado Boulevard Bridge. The exhibition draws a direct line between a historic road of crossings and reinventions and Dominique Moodys decades-long inquiry into home, mobility, and self-determination.
Assemblage as a life practice
Dominique Moody works at the intersection of assemblage, performance, and life, attuned to ancestral diasporic kin from West Africa and shaped by more than sixty years as an urban nomad. Transforming salvaged wood, glass, metal, photographs, and found objects, she aligns with a lineage of Black assemblage art rooted in the mid-twentieth-century history of South Los Angeles, a throughline that includes John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar. At the center of Moodys practice is N.O.M.A.D. Narrative. Odyssey. Manifesting. Artistic. Dreams. a 1950 salvaged truck and trailer constructed with washing machine doors, corrugated metal, vintage barn wood, a bicycle rim, reclaimed wood, and collage panels. Simultaneously home and studio, artwork and vehicle, it has evolved over decades as a living site for making and moving.
Works that chart movement and memory
The exhibition features a large-scale architectural elevation drawing of the truck and trailer measuring 23 feet 3 and a half inches wide. Precise and technical lines are layered with silhouetted figures a musician with an instrument, a child, a woman holding a baby, and a figure at the door binding structure to the human lives within it. Elsewhere, a hanging work on map collage pairs an elevation drawing of the truck and trailer with an architectural rendering of a house, both floating over streets and routes, with small photographs suspended from strings.
A grouping of corked glass bottles deep cobalt blue, clear, and olive green bears handwritten tags that read SWEAT EQUITY. A small vintage key hangs from one bottle. An earlier work, My Road to Freedom (2009), assembled from a cardboard shoebox, a vintage metal roller skate, raffia, found objects, and map collage (eight by twelve by six inches), is in the collection of Dr. Joy Simmons. Wall text links the piece to Moodys childhood memory of metal roller skates and a lifelong love of things that move on wheels, foreshadowing N.O.M.A.D.s core ideas: mobility as independence and a home that can travel.
Moody was born in Augsburg, Germany to two African-American parents; her father, a military officer, chose to remain in Europe because he felt it was too toxic for a Black man in the United States. She moved from Germany to Philadelphia, to New York at sixteen as an emancipated minor, then to San Francisco and Los Angeles approaching her fiftieth address. Both self-taught and formally educated, she attended Pratt Institute and later graduated from UC Berkeley with a Phi Beta Kappa Honor in Fine Art Practice in 1991, receiving the Maybelle Toombs Award. Diagnosed legally blind at 28, she has said it changed her eyesight but not her artistic vision. Her work is held in public and private collections in the United States and abroad; over the past twenty-five years she has exhibited at the California African American Museum, Craft Contemporary, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the National Museum of Mexican-American Art in Chicago, the Japanese American National Museum, the Skirball Cultural Center, and the Watts Towers Arts Center, among others. She has received grants from the California Community Foundation, Finding Family Stories, and the Seen and Heard Foundation.
Curated by Taylor Bythewood-Porter, NOMAD: Dominique Moody and the Assemblage of Home is on view at the Armory Arts Center, 145 N. Raymond Ave, Pasadena, through January 16, 2027.
Vía artandcakela.com
