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Pirate Jenny

Carrie Moyer American
2012
Not on view
Moyer is renowned as both a queer activist (she cofounded the ongoing public art project Dyke Action Machine! in 1991) and as a painter who works lush colors and fluid forms into vibrant, sparkling compositions. She combines revolutionary, modernist techniques—from the pours that Helen Frankenthaler pioneered in the early 1950s to hard-edged shapes borrowed from graphic design and geometric abstraction—and reclaims them for radical, feminist ends. In Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera (1928), Polly sings the famous "Pirate Jenny," in which she fantasizes the arrival of a ghostly ship whose pilots she commands: They will wreak vengeance upon her oppressors and then provide her safe passage across a glittering sea.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Pirate Jenny
  • Artist: Carrie Moyer (American, born Detroit, Michigan, 1960)
  • Date: 2012
  • Medium: Acrylic, glitter, and graphite on cotton duck
  • Dimensions: 72 × 72 in. (182.9 × 182.9 cm)
  • Classification: Paintings
  • Credit Line: Gift of Shirley and Sidney Singer, 2018
  • Object Number: 2018.873
  • Rights and Reproduction: © Carrie Moyer
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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