In Pursuit of Home

What does it mean to claim a place, to cross the threshold and call it yours? For many Americans now in their twenties and thirties, the notion of owning a home hovers at the edge of fiction, eroded by wage stagnation, student-loan debt, and a housing market whose prices soar faster than salaries. For Black Americans, that dream has never been simply economic; it is shadowed by a long history of state-sanctioned exclusion from the redlining maps of the 1930s to the subprime lending traps of the 2000s that deliberately severed Black families from this primary engine of generational wealth.

Mario Moore situates this fraught terrain at the center of In Pursuit of Home. Through meticulously rendered paintings, graphite drawings, and bronze sculptures, Moore probes the architecture, literal and symbolic, that dictates who is granted stability and who must improvise it. Domestic interiors flicker between sanctuary and surveillance; verdant backyards become contested ground; figures at rest appear both protected and precarious, their ease hard-won. The artist's Detroit roots surface in layered references to labor and land.