THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Sabra Moore

“My life in New Mexico is different but totally connected. It’s a definite straight line in different places.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, April 2026

SM:  I’m Sabra Moore and I was born in 1943 in Texarkana, Texas.

JW:  Can you tell about your childhood, ethnic background, siblings? What do you think led you to the person you became?

SM:  I come from a working-class family. My parents eloped because of the Civil War. My daddy’s grandfather fought for the Ohio Infantry Regiment during the Civil War for the Union. And my mother’s family were folks from Texas. My great-grandfather put his Ohio Infantry Union Regiment on his tombstone in our tiny country cemetery in East Texas. I made a piece for him called “Not a Civilian.”

Years ago, I did a show about my family in Texas. Daddy organized for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. My mother was a teacher, but she went to school my whole childhood to become a teacher. And when she finally got her teaching certificate, we moved to Pleasant Grove, which was outside of Dallas, a kind of hard move for me as a child. I have an older sister, and I have an aunt who is eight years older than me, so I have a baby aunt.

They’re both gone now. But when I was a kid, there were union people in my house all the time. My first trips outside of Texas were for strikes. We went twice to New Orleans for strikes. So, I grew up with a political family and then I went to the University of Texas. I have a degree in Plan 2, which was an honors program. I finished my studies at the university in 1964,

I knew my family wouldn’t send me to graduate school. You know, I didn’t expect that. And it wasn’t a big deal for me, but I had applied for scholarships and if I had gotten a scholarship to a graduate program. probably in California, I would have continued to get a master’s. But I also applied for the Peace Corps. And so, when I didn’t get the scholarship, I wasn’t really upset.

I went to the Peace Corps, and I lived for two years in Guinea, West Africa, an ally of North Vietnam. It was a really wonderful place. I lived a thousand miles from the capital, and it was just two years after independence for Guinea. Sekou Toure was president. Shortly after I arrived in Guinea, he banned travel for foreigners. So, I didn’t see the Peace Corps for two years.

I was right on the edge of the Sahara Desert. I had a great time in Guinea. I always painted and drew, but it was in Guinea that I really became an artist. It made people very open to approaching me if they saw me drawing. And so, it really made a difference. I traveled all the way down the west coast of Africa from Guinea to Nigeria by truck and “mammy wagon,” just in the ordinary way that people traveled at that time.

I could stay in Peace Corps hostels, so I always had interesting places to stay. My sweet father died when I was in Guinea. He was killed by a drunk driver in the fall of my second year. So I never returned to Texas. I knew two people in New York who were artists, and I knew one person in San Francisco, so I decided to move to New York City. I lived there for 30 years. I went there in 1966.

After being there for a year, I got a scholarship to England to do African studies. But by then, I had gotten involved with my painting teacher. I don’t really want to name him, but he was a black artist. He was in Spiral. And so I knew all the people in The Spiral. Romare Bearden and Rick Mayhew and all of those people. For five years, I was in an environment of black artists.

When I was in England for my fellowship, a guy named Calvin — I had left my drawings with him from Africa – he threatened to destroy them. And so amazingly, I came back.

I started living with him. I didn’t think all that through at the time. I didn’t know how to handle it. And so, I had to quit my scholarship. I came back in the spring. My life went on, because that’s the way it is when you’re young. Finally I left him. He tried to kill me, and I didn’t tell people. I tried to get help from people.

All these guys at Spiral who I really knew and who I cooked dinners for and stuff. They didn’t believe me. The only person who believed me was a college student of Calvin. I managed to get away. He used to teach at Vassar two days every week. So, when he was teaching, I moved out.

Then my life kind of blossomed. I joined an artist-run gallery. And I met the guy that I’ve lived with until two years ago. He died. Sweet, sweet Roger. I met Roger Mignon at the Atlantic Gallery. By then I was smarter than I had been. We didn’t get involved for a year. We were really friends first and I think it made a huge difference. And I also worked at the first legal abortion clinic in New York from 1970 to 1972.

JW:  When did you learn about women’s issues?

SM:  I’m talking about the late 60s and the early 70s. I had had an abortion in Guinea from which I could have easily died, but I didn’t. I didn’t have very good sex education growing up because I grew up in Texas. And so, I managed finally to get an abortion. I was at 13 weeks, which, as I learned from working at the clinic, is late and the time that’s really kind of dangerous for getting an abortion. You can easily hemorrhage during that time.

And, and so I was really desperate because I tried other things  I had tried quinine. I had tried getting this drug that Guinea women used for abortion. I got it but it didn’t work. And, and then finally I was an old Look Magazine and I read an article that said that abortion was legal in Czechoslovakia. And there was a Czech doctor in a neighboring town. So I borrowed money from the guy that ran the grocery store and, and I went to Kankan and I got an abortion.

Actually, the other doctor there was Vietnamese. This was 1965. And he said, “she’s American and I’m Vietnamese. We’re friends.” I mean, it was like very weird to be a representative of my country when I was getting an abortion. Then I visited Peace Corps volunteers, who never knew why I had come.

I was passing big clots and I saw the doctor again before I left. and he knew that I had passed those clots and he thought it was fine. But two weeks later, after I returned to my town, I hemorrhaged. My housemate heard me hemorrhaging. By then a doctor had come to town. I would have died if that hadn’t happened. But he came to town a week before I hemorrhaged and he gave me a DNC and I was fine. I was young, I was very pale, so it took me some weeks to get normal again, but I was so relieved to be okay.

All of that had happened to me. So, when the first legal abortion clinic opened up in New York, I was already in a feminist group called W.A.R. which was actually Women’s Action Coalition or Women Artists in Revolution. I forget what that exactly the acronym was, but it was WAR and we had meetings every week and we just talked and cried. 

I had also been in a consciousness-raising group with a Peace Corps volunteers’ group. Because I was involved with the anti-war movement forever, we all protested the Vietnam War.  So I had been in these two feminist groups and then the people that were starting the clinic, which was the Judson Memorial Church, came to our meeting and recruited women who had had illegal abortions. And I had had one. It probably wasn’t illegal in Guinea but felt it. I worked at the clinic for two years before abortion became legal.

It was a very intense time. The doctors were all men except for one woman, Dr. June Fine. This one doctor, Dr. Walden, we all started seeing him as our gynecologist. He was a really sweet man and he was the only doctor in our clinic who gave a completely painless abortion. He actually wrote the textbook about how to do that.

JW: How did he do that? 

SM:  If you do many little dots in a circle around the cervix and wait like five minutes, the cervix gets numb and your patient doesn’t feel any pain. And so it was very tricky for all of us who were working there because we all wanted Dr. Walden to do the abortion because he didn’t cause any pain. But the other doctors caused a lot of pain, and we managed to get a couple of them fired. But it was tricky. You had to go.

There was like a little side room where you went and you put up your number when your patient was ready, because we would interview the patient. We spent an hour and a half with each patient. I worked at night there. In the evenings you would have four patients. For the patients, it remained very good. For us, it became very stressful at a certain point. And so, we used to have meetings and cry, and it was a very complicated, intense job.

Finally, after a year of this, we formed a union with 1199, the hospital workers union. Remember, it was Judson Memorial Church that was our sponsor, that formed the clinic. But they thought that we were kind of like mercenaries.

Even though we didn’t ask for more pay, we just wanted to preserve the number of patients that we were seeing for abortion. They wanted to speed it up because they thought it had been a year and that we could do more patients. We managed with our union contract to get the patient limit. We did succeed in that. But they also hired a lot of nurses who we trained. And about six months after the nurses came, they wanted to join our union too. So, it was a very intense, crazy time.

I became friends with Georgia Matsumoto, who had gone to Yale, who was Japanese American and whose family had had to move. They didn’t get imprisoned during the war, but her father was in the military, and they moved. Georgia and I decided to quit. It just had become far too much emotionally.

JW:  What did you do next?

SM:  We became house painters. We did that for five years. I remember one day when I was visiting Georgia. I saw the newspaper that said that abortion had become legal. So, I ran back to Georgia’s loft. I was so happy and relieved. We cried then too. It was a crazy time. All of that happened for me at the same time. I worked at the clinic, I freed myself from Calvin. I took off guys for a year. And then when Roger and I got involved, I managed to get involved with a wonderful person. He died two and a half years ago. We had a great life together. So a lot changed in that period of time. And, then I was in a show at the Community Gallery that Henri Ghent curated.

I was the only white artist in the show. And for years after that, maybe for 20 years, I would get invitations as a black artist, and I would have to write a little letter to say I’m the wrong color because it was so rare. The art world was so segregated in terms of gender and race. The art world was very segregated at that point. That was sort of my entry through war. There were tons of demonstrations.

We went to so many demonstrations trying to influence the museums to show more work by women and by people of color.  We also went to demonstrations against the war. It was a very intense, complicated period of time. That’s the long answer to your question. I was in many groups. I was in the Women’s Caucus for Art. I was president of the caucus for two years. I also did a lot of shows with women.

They were wonderful shows with the caucus I organized in 1982.  I was president of the caucus, and there was going to be a conference in New York City and we decided to do, I think it was 16 shows in 16 different locations. So we advertised it and the rules were that an artist could submit to any of the shows, but she could only accept one. There were many different, many diverse critics.

Lucy Lippard and Candace Hill Montgomery did one of them. I did a show called Pieced Work. There were lots of famous people who curated these shows and also not famous. There was a huge variety. And we had 16 shows so that they had two nights of openings in two different places. It was really crazy. And then one of the members of the caucus was Bibi Lencek who died last year, I’m sad to say.  Bibi’s husband, Tak Inagaki, was a Japanese filmmaker. And so I called Tak to see if we could get buses that would go to the openings those two nights.

I just called him for advice, but then he volunteered to do the buses. And he had Japanese bus girls who would come into the opening with a little sign saying “Bus is leaving.” And so it was really fun. The shows were uptown and downtown. They were in all kinds of galleries and places. We did a catalog for that. Later, we did a beautiful catalog and got funding for the catalog, and so we produced everyone’s name. We didn’t reproduce everyone’s picture, but a lot of them. Faith Ringgold did a show too. It’s still a beautiful catalog. The NYC Women’s Caucus for Art.

JW:  Tell us more about the Women’s Caucus on Art.

SM:  It came out of the College Art Association for the same reason that everything happened for women’s stuff, because we were not part. And so we formed our own groups, and by forming our own groups, we met each other. And everybody was in these women’s groups and everyone was in these women’s shows because even women who became very famous, like Louise Bourgeois, in the beginning she didn’t have a gallery either.

It all happened simultaneously through the anti-war movement, through the civil rights movement, then the women’s movement. When I was in anti-war movement with the Committee for Return Volunteers, we were working with guys too. And then we all started. It’s just the way consciousness-raising happened. It happened by talking together in small groups. And then when we got together to talk, we all realized, this isn’t just my problem. This is happening to everyone.

So that’s what consciousness-raising was, that you became conscious of your oppression, because it had been able to be oppression because it was individual. And then when you realized that it wasn’t individual, that it was actually systemic, then you could do something about it. I remember one of these meetings that we had at the Brooklyn Museum when we were protesting that museum. You know, someone mentioned the word sexism and the guys all laughed.

JW:  The guys all thought it was a joke, right?

SM:  It was a process of becoming aware of oppression for everybody, for gay people, for black people, for women. I mean, it was a process. And it was a process that was happening in every group, as you were united for a political structure against the Vietnam War. But you were working together and then you were realizing we’re the ones that are always making the coffee and the guys are talking.

And so, it was just a process. And that was the same process that led us to start having our own shows. And we had fabulous shows. I mean, they were really fun. And, and so the Women’s Caucus for Art formed that way too. I wasn’t part of that. I forget how, but I think someone told me about the meetings of the caucus and said, you should go. And so I went. And what the caucus was doing was they had women art historians and women artists together meeting.

And we all met in different people’s houses. We sort of rotated, moved around to different people who would volunteer to open their loft or their apartment. And we would have a meeting there. And then we would always have a little food afterwards and talk. Then when you talk, that’s how you learned what else was happening. So it was all decentralized, but, centralized at the same time.

My friend Ora Lerman was president of the Caucus at the time. When I joined, the meetings were not huge, maybe 30 or 40 people. When Ora stopped being the president, she asked me if I wanted to run. I wrote about this in my book. I had a dream about it at the time too. So, I became part of the caucus. At the same time I became part of the Heresies Collective too. We all knew each other. We all ran into each other at different meetings and different events and different protests. 

I knew Lucy Lippard slightly, just faintly. When Heresies started the Ecology Issue, which was Issue Number 13, Lucy wrote me to ask if I was interested in being part of that issue. I was, and that’s when Lucy and I really became friends. We both now live in New Mexico, actually with four people from the Heresies Collective. Well, not May Stevens who died.

Harmony Hammond, Lucy and I live in different towns, but we’re all here in New Mexico now. When Heresies was only two years old I started working on the Ecology Issue. We met for two and a half years. The issues were supposed to be every four months, but that’s not what happened. Ana Mendieta was on that issue too. When we were doing the Ecology Issue, Mount St. Helens exploded, so she’s on our cover. We met for a long time. People had people split up with people. We were very, very dedicated to doing the issue, but it was a crazy process too.

JW:  What year was it that you were president of the Caucus?

SM:  1980 to 1982. I was there for two years.

JW:  You’ve been involved in women and women’s issues for a while. Are you still doing stuff?

SM:  Yeah, I’m still doing stuff. They’ve changed, but I’m still doing stuff. I’ve lived here in New Mexico now for almost 30 years, as long as I lived in New York, actually. I still keep connections to New York and in New Mexico. I also worked as a photo editor in New York. I was a freelance photo editor.

I did maybe 30 books, mostly for Doubleday, and some pretty famous books, too. All that changed too, by the time I moved, because there were no computers at the beginning and the photo research was all done by writing people or going to photo archives and stuff. I mostly did art books.  I would work on some books for maybe two years. I really loved being a photo editor.

When Georgia and I quit the abortion clinic, we did house painting for six years. I later learned from someone living here who worked at an abortion clinic in Iowa, and she said that had happened there too, that people ended up doing physical work after leaving the clinic. It was an intense time. And so you needed to just do something plain, like paint walls.

Georgia’s dead now too, I’m sorry to say. As I said, Georgia went to Yale and she studied with Al Held. And then she stopped painting. It really shocked me. I met somebody here who had known her and who told me she had died. Georgia continued doing house painting the rest of her life. I’m still shocked about that.

To get back to the 70s and 80s and 90s, and before I moved here, I did other things too. In terms of the art world, there was WAC, the Women’s Action Coalition. I was part of that for two years. WAC happened just at the end of the 80s.

A lot of younger women joined us, and the rest of us had all done things together for 20 years. It was also just when computers were coming in. And so these young women were quite different from us. I mean, it was interesting and good that we all met each other, but WAC became huge. It met at the Drawing Center and it became huge. It kind of fell apart too. And that was just when I was leaving New York.

JW:  You got involved in women’s issues first because of your physical health and then moved into these other areas during the beginning years of learning about how women were kind of second class. How did that affect the rest of the activities you got into in your life?

SM:  I don’t think we ever felt that women were second class, but we definitely knew that we were excluded from the dominant art world. We took action to do something about it. And you see, when you become active, you don’t feel bad anymore. You feel mad. It’s quite different. The energy is quite different.

Once you start organizing and getting together and talking, you also learn of opportunities that you could do shows and other things. We did with Strangers against the museums for years. It’s in my book. There was a huge demonstration at the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art had closed for some months. It got renovated and when it reopened there was a big show with almost 200 artists shown and something like 30 were women.

So, we felt like we had done this so many times and then there it was still. We called a huge demonstration, and it was the Caucus and Heresies that called the demonstration. And that one was quite different from all our other demonstrations.

It ended up being huge. I made a model MOMA that I was going to carry on a pole with another friend, and then the pole broke so it was on the floor. So people could put their names in the museum in the little model. That’s in my archive at Barnard for the women’s art movement. Suddenly the newspapers were there. The New York Times came out. It really hit a nerve at the time.

Everybody was there, all the women artists that we all knew, famous and not famous. We were all there together. It was really sweet. It changed sort of after that. Louise Bourgeois had a show. When Guggenheim moved downtown many years later, it was when the caucus was meeting, the WAC was meeting. And we were all upset about the Guggenheim moving downtown because they were only showing men. One of the men they were showing was Carl Andre.

By then Ana Mendieta had died. Ana had worked with us in Heresies in the first issue, Heresies 13. Ana was a Cuban born artist, and she was married to Carl Andre. Ana did mostly performance work and she eventually made peace with Cuba too. Her family had immigrated and Ana and her sister had immigrated as children. Ana had a lot of anger. She had a scholarship in Rome and then she came back to New York to see Carl and also I think probably to move out of Carl’s place. They lived on the 34th floor of a big building in lower Manhattan. Well, I think Carl pushed her out the window. She died. She fell onto a balcony, like maybe the second or third floor out of the 34th floor. They were both really drunk.

Carl called the police. A few of us met with the detective that was prosecuting Carl. Basically when he called the police, he said that he and Ana were having an argument about who was the most famous in the art world. And then Ana went out the window.

We did a memorial for Ana. Carl was at it. He was at that memorial and sitting sort of alone. It split the art world because many women who were active in the Art Workers Coalition knew Carl as a friend, including my friend Lucy. And they were ambivalent. They couldn’t believe that he could have killed Ana. Then he had a trial.

I forget who, but a famous artist gave him money for the trial. He chose not to have a jury, but a judge. The judge thought that honor was like an unconscious suicide. He got off. After he got off, he could never show his work here, but because it was, people always came out to demonstrate against him. Women did. He’s dead now. But it really split our group because of the various alliances. We really loved her.

So, when the Guggenheim came downtown, Carl was in the show. Just about two weeks before it opened, they invited Louise Bourgeois, and we were all fine about Louise being in it. In fact, I saw her when she was going to the show and she sort of raised her fist a little bit. It had been five years since Ana had died. And so WAC got a band and we did a demonstration.

In lower Manhattan, the streets are narrow and tight. Our group all gathered and I had made these little cards that are like calling cards with Ana Mendieta’s wonderful silhouettes on the cards on both sides. If you threw it down, it was fine. Either side, the same side. It said on both sides in English and Spanish: “We remember Ana Mendieta.” The idea was that if you encountered a Carl Andre, you would just throw it onto his piece because he worked on the floor. He did sort of conceptual art. It was on the floor often, like bricks and stuff.

Some people had invitations to the demonstration. And those people who were in our group were going into the demonstration and they asked me for cards. And so his work was littered with my cards. Then Lucy came. She stayed in our demonstration, to her credit. We were all crying. It was the real moment of being able to mourn her loss. It was intense. It was incredibly intense. But none of us got arrested. It all stayed intense but peaceful. And some people went to the show and most of us stayed outside, and that was it. But it was the time that we really mourned Ana for what had happened to her.

I worked with Heresies for 12 years. And so how Heresies functioned is that we had different themes for different issues. There was a mother collective which would advertise a new issue. Sometimes we would have a party, or there were different ways we did things to announce the issue. There was always a mother collective member, or at least one, on the issue collective. But people who wanted to be on that collective could join if you worked on it. No one was paid, but you could be part of the issue. There were many different issues, and the ecology one was really important to me.

About five years ago, some women in Portugal made another ecology issue. I have it too. They did a beautiful job. They did a show, and it took us many years. I put them in contact with all the surviving members of that collective. They corresponded with all of us. Then they made a beautiful issue in which our cover was there, and then they did another with their own cover of a different size.

All the issues were quite interesting with Heresies. They were all thematic. I think there’s 21 issues altogether that got reproduced. But an issue I was going to mention was we did an issue called “Mothers, Mags and Movie Stars – Feminism and Class.” The New Museum was a new museum at that time. And we actually had a show at the New Museum related to that issue.

And there’s going to be a big Heresies show once Trump is out of office so that we can get funding. I’m in touch with the curator for many years now who’s been working on this show. The issues had their own energy and it was an intense and wonderful place to go.

JW:  Do you have any concluding thoughts, any concluding statement you’d like to make?

SM:  You asked me about what I was doing in New Mexico. When I moved here, I’d been a photo editor. Roger and I hadn’t planned to move here full time. We thought we would keep our loft in New York. But by the time we finished building, we were here more than we were in New York, so we just moved here.

When I was in New York, I was able to still do my photo editing work, and I could do it here too. But once I moved full time, that kind of ended. And it was also when the computers were changing. The computers came in and it switched the art world, switched the publishing world. When I tried to get photo editing work in New Mexico, basically nobody even knew what it was. It took me a while to realize that I was not going to succeed in doing this.

I ended up doing community-based works. First, I answered a small ad for being a manager of a farmer’s market in Espanola. I was the only applicant. I got the job and of course it paid almost nothing, but I did the market for 23 years and it really grew.

I’m originally from farmers. My grandparents were both farmers. It was my way to be connected to the traditional culture here. And I would never have gotten that connection if I hadn’t had that funny thing of answering that ad. The first year, there was a little money left over, and I decided to do a fiesta, I think in September. I’m an artist so I made a postcard. At first, the postcard was small, like a regular postcard size. And then it became a giant postcard because the market became so huge. The market was so much fun. It still is. The two women they have now hired have kept the postcard.

And then a friend of mine recruited me for Artists in the Schools. She was a ceramic artist, and she wanted me to work with her on a ceramic project. And I said, I’m not a ceramic artist. And she said, I’ve seen your bathroom, because I had tiled it. I did Artists in the Schools for 15 years. In some of the schools here in Rio Arriba County, there are huge outdoor mosaics. The kids brought in the clay, they made the tiles, we designed the form of the mosaic, and we installed it. It’s really joyful for me to go around and see the mosaics.

Then I also worked with my local library. I think in the 18th and 19th centuries, native children were captured and then sold into domestic slavery. They were captured as children, so they lost their tribal identification. They were freed in adulthood when they were 20 or something. They became known as Genizaros, which was a Spanish word that came with the conquest here, and Abiquiu is the first village. We did the first conferences in Abiquiu. 

Now there’s a lot of scholarship about this culture.  It’s been a privilege for me to be connected to the people in Abiquiu. Some years ago someone came out from Berkeley and wanted to do a project in the village and so for five years there were different graduate students who were here. We also we got funding to employ kids who worked with the students.

Yes, my life in New Mexico is different but totally connected. It’s a definite straight line in different places. I still show my work. I’m in a show right now at the New Mexico Museum of Art. One of my canoes that’s a seven-foot canoe is the lead object in the show. It just opened on Saturday. I also continue to organize shows, not just with women but with other people. So, I’ve continued to do that too in addition to making my own work and showing my work.