Montego Bay is a color relief print from about 1969 by American artist Seong Moy. It is pencil signed, titled, and editioned 23/50. Montego Bay was printed by the artist on a soft ivory wove paper and the image measures 20-1/8 x 26-1/8 inches.
According to Francis Harvey in a 1954 article written for Print: The Magazine for the Graphic Arts, “Moy’s techniques of printmaking represent a considerable advance. By using innovative techniques such as transferring designs painted on transparent celluloid to woodblocks, Mr. Moy was able to retain the immediacy of his image making and the painterly quality that made his work so recognizable. In his later works, Mr. Moy continued his inventive use of materials and techniques, incorporating the collage medium, and experimenting with non-traditional, common materials. He pioneered a technique of printmaking using cardboard known as color relief printing.”
The eminent critic Emily Genauer wrote of Mr. Moy’s art, “It is a language, seemingly abstract, that through its mélange of bright colors and fragmentary shapes as vivid as banners whipping in the wind, communicates concretely what the artist saw and felt… His own work always stems from events and experiences, deriving from past and present, and melting into a unified image.”
Seong Moy, painter, printmaker, muralist, and teacher, was born in Canton, China on 12 April 1921. At ten years of age, he immigrated to the United States to live with relatives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Moy began his art studies as a teenager under Ben Swanson at the Work Progress Administration Federal Art Project school in St. Paul. Between 1936 and 1940, Moy studied at the St. Paul School of Art under Cameron Booth. He also worked at the Federal Art Project print shop at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1939 to 1941. In 1941, Moy was awarded scholarships to the Art Students League, where he studied with Vaclav Vytlacil, and to the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, both in New York.
In 1942, Moy enlisted in the U.S. Air Force as a photographer. He became a member of the 14th Air Force, the Flying Tigers, and worked as an aerial reconnaissance photographer in China and Southeast Asia. After his service ended, Moy returned to the Art Students League on the G.I. Bill and re-established his relationship with Cameron Booth, who was now teaching in New York. He also worked at Stanley William Hayter‘s Atelier 17 at the New School in New York between 1948 and 1950.
Moy began his teaching career in 1951 with painting classes at the University of Minnesota. Over the years he taught part time at various universities and colleges, including the City College of New York, Smith College, Vassar College, Cooper Union, Pratt Contemporaries Graphic Art Center, and the Art Students League. In 1954, he opened the Seong Moy School of Painting and Graphic Arts, as a summer school in Provincetown and taught painting, drawing and printmaking for twenty years.
Moy won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 and his work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally. Moy was a member of the 14 Painter-Printmakers Group which also included Will Barnet, Minna Citron, Worden Day, Perle Fine, Sue Fuller, Jan Gelb, Boris Margo, Alice T. Mason, Gabor Peterdi, Louis Schanker, Karl Schrag, Kurt Seligmann and John von Wicht. The Brooklyn Museum presented their work in the seminal exhibition 14 Painter—Printmakers in November 1955.
Seong Moy is represented in the collections of the Baltimore Museum, Maryland; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Syracuse University Art Museum, New York; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Seong Moy died in New York City on 9 June 2013.
