Barriers Overcome

Moses received invitations to lecture at numerous venues throughout Chicago, the United States, and Europe. He also juried art competitions and served as a discussion moderator on academic panels. As evidenced in the photographs of a North Shore Art League art showcase from February 1965, he appears to have often been the only Black person in attendance at these events. Indeed, the museums, galleries, and academies that constituted the primary spaces of the art world were predominantly occupied by white people, and this often-exclusionary environment in many ways endures to this day. Moses understood that his efforts to carve out a place for himself within these institutions had significance beyond his personal experience. As he wrote in a letter to his wife Alice in 1961 while considering a teaching post at Lower Merion High School, where he had graduated a little over a decade earlier, “My being appointed would constitute something of a breakthrough into the higher echelons of Lower Merion’s teaching system, where no Negro has been hired except in one almost exclusively colored elementary school.” The many pamphlets, flyers, invitations, newspaper clippings, and photographs shown here attest to his hard-won success and suggest that much more was certain to follow.