Interview with Charles Moore
Charles Moore’s path to becoming one of today's most globally engaged curators began in an unexpected place: a career in wealth management. However, it was through collecting art himself that Moore recognized the accessibility gap in the art world, which led him to Harvard for a degree in Museum Studies and eventually to Columbia for his doctoral degree. Now a New York-based critic, curator, and author, Moore has staged exhibitions across numerous countries while writing extensively about Black cultural expression, color theory, and making the art world more inclusive. His book The Black Market: A Guide to Art Collecting has been translated into ten languages, helping novices navigate a field that often speaks only to insiders. His latest project pushes conversation to its limits: Charles Moore: 24 Hour Interview documents Moore’s sleepless marathon at The Betsy Hotel, where he engaged with 24 artists, curators, and collectors from around the world—no sleep, just pure dialogue. I caught up with Moore to discuss borderless curation, accessibility, and what happens when endurance meets inquiry.
Portrait of Charles Moore (2024). Courtesy of the author and The Betsy Hotel South Beach.
Anh Dao Ha: Your work spans continents—you’ve curated exhibitions from Colombia to Romania to Germany. When you walk into a gallery, what do you notice first that most people miss? How does this “borderless curatorial engagement” challenge what you are familiar with in the art world?
Charles Moore: From the very beginning, my intentions as both a writer and curator have always been anchored in a global perspective. My first book, The Black Market: A Guide to Art Collecting (2020), was translated into ten languages, and my formative years living in Italy (2009–2012) deepened that sensibility. When I walk into a gallery, I’m not entirely sure what others perceive or overlook, but I am immediately attuned to the spatial atmosphere—and perhaps more importantly, to the people inhabiting it. I want to sense the energy of the room, to discern what that community is longing to encounter, what existential questions they are asking of art, and what cultural or intellectual nourishment they seek.
For me, curating is less about providing definitive answers than about furnishing the conditions for inquiry. I liken it to issuing a library card: I do not prescribe what one should read, but I create access so that individuals may pursue the texts, or in this case, the concepts that speak most urgently to them.
This is where the paradox of borders becomes palpable. For some, especially those of us with certain privileges, the art world can appear seamlessly transnational; for others, geopolitical, economic, or cultural barriers remain deeply entrenched. I am aware of my ability to move about many spaces freely, and I view curatorial work beyond my own community not as a form of cultural imposition but as an opportunity for reciprocal learning, intellectual exchange, and philosophical dialogue. Unfortunately, many curators remain circumscribed within their own milieus—sometimes by choice, often by lack of resources (curators and writers are the lowest paid, and highly underappreciated)—which inevitably constrains the possibility of shared learning across cultures. To me, that is one of the greatest losses of the art world
AH: Your new book, 24 Hour Interview, chronicles a sleepless marathon at The Betsy Hotel, engaging with 24 voices from around the world. After years of conducting interviews, what made you want to push the format to this extreme? What happens to conversation when you strip away rest?
CM: The impetus came from my life’s two obsessions—well, two of these obsessions—endurance running and intellectual discourse. In 2016, while contemplating a career change, I also began running marathons. While completing my master’s at Harvard and starting to work in the arts, I was simultaneously running in Boston, London, Rome, Paris, and Tokyo—all while publishing books, curating exhibitions, and conducting interviews for publications such as Juxtapoz. The act of sustaining an interview marathon felt like the perfect synthesis of physical endurance and communion with visionaries—and a whole lot of crazy.
A hotel seemed the natural place for such an experiment: controlled acoustics, access to amenities, and a certain psychological/physical comfort. I pitched the idea to a few hotels I found that had art programs. All of them turned me down, except for The Betsy in Miami.
What I hadn’t anticipated was the physiological toll of sleep deprivation. Much like a race, the adrenaline that deprived me of rest the night before became the same force that carried me through the following 24 hours. By hour 18, I was hallucinating; by hour 21, I was bargaining with myself to continue. Yet the conversations themselves became a source of sustenance. I recall Çağla Ilk speaking to me from a train in Germany, Francis Upritchard offering a vision of practice I had barely known before but have since come to cherish, and Ana Prvački infusing the final minutes with a certain energy that propelled me to the finish line. It’s no surprise, since she’s a performance artist. The Betsy, with its multiple environments, allowed me to recalibrate the tempo of the dialogue, ensuring that even amidst exhaustion, the conversations remained steady…I think. I guess you’ll have to read it and tell me what you think.
24-Hour Interview (2025). Courtesy of the author and Mousse Publishing.
AH: You mention that your interviews offer “intimate glimpses” rarely seen elsewhere. What draws out that vulnerability in your subjects? Is there a curatorial sensibility to how you structure conversations?
CM: There is a Japanese paradigm I often return to—the “three faces model”. It’s the idea that we perform multiple identities: a public face that conforms to external expectations, a more authentic face shared with family and friends, and a third, hidden face that is rarely revealed.
For reasons I can only describe as energetic or atmospheric, people tend to open up to me quickly, often moving beyond that second face toward something closer to the third. I’ve always been a confidant to people, whether to friends, family, or even strangers, and my interviews seem to reproduce that dynamic—I think.
AH: What motivated you to translate The Black Market: A Guide to Art Collecting into ten different languages? What do you think drove the international demand for this particular book on art collecting?
CM: A close friend once said to me after reading the book: “You could cover the word ‘Black,’ and this text would still resonate universally with anyone interested in art or art collecting.” That observation stayed with me. Having lived in Rome and learned Italian fluency, and now speaking German while studying Russian, I have long been fascinated by languages.
I began to imagine myself, back in 2010 or 2011, walking into a bookshop in Rome and seeing this book in Italian. I would have picked it up instantly, believing that I, or whoever wrote this book, was speaking directly to me. That hypothetical became a guiding principle: what if someone in Guayaquil, Bordeaux, Chengdu, or Sofia might share that feeling? Translation, then, became not merely a matter of access but a way of collapsing cultural distance.
I targeted languages that were both art centers (France, Italy, China, the Netherlands, Mexico) and places I had personally traveled to (such as Bulgaria). Even if the book resonated with just one reader in each language, it was a win, in my opinion. Over the years, my writing has been translated into Romanian, Georgian, Polish, and Igbo, among others. Translation, for me, is an act of sharing.
AH: Your recent exhibition, The Lorax, was structured as an open call. Do you think alternative methods of exhibition making are emerging? What formats are you pursuing beyond traditional curatorial approaches?
CM: Open calls are not a new thing, yet this was my first encounter with the format. They can democratize opportunity, sometimes. For me, it expanded my radar. I encountered artists whose work I had never seen, and I was able to juxtapose them with artists already in my realm.
I don’t regard this method as “alternative” since it’s been done over and over again. In the case of The Lorax, I had been influenced by all the chatter on ecology and the environment. I had seen quite a few exhibitions abroad speaking to environmental ethics, and I wanted to situate my ideas within that global discourse.
Beyond that, I love working with non-traditional spaces. Birthday Song, a project I curated in a mobile office in Berlin with Nadia Valeska, transformed a utilitarian structure into an intimate laboratory of encounter. La Casa, el Sueño y la Otredad, co-curated with Sebastián Isla in Mexico City, unfolded in an abandoned mansion, it was almost poetic how the people who came to speak about how electrifying the experience was for them.
Perhaps most ambitiously, my show(s) Interlace spanned three countries simultaneously—New York, Mexico City, and Bogotá—each gallery presenting a solo exhibition by Salvador Jiménez-Flores, María José Chica, and Gonzalo Garcia. Together, these concurrent exhibitions spoke of narratives of migration, hybridity, and identity across geographies. The galleries, Kates-Ferri Projects, CAM Galeria, SKETCH, were transformed into a sort of Bermuda triangle for six weeks. It was incredible. That month, April 2025, I opened five shows in five countries and went to all five openings.
Telvin Wallace, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, II, 2025. Oil and Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Brown University.
AH: What are you most excited about in the art world right now?
CM: What excites me most is collaboration—the way alliances generate unforeseen beauty. My ongoing work with Richard Beavers Gallery feels like I’m on the team. In Romania, Alex Radu and I are preparing Notes from Underground, Part II: Apropos of the Wet Snow, which opens October 2 in Bucharest. Direlia Lazo and I just released Global Conversations: Mexico.
I am also fortunate to be in ongoing dialogue with artists like Telvin Wallace, Federico Solmi, Natia Lemay, Xavier Daniels, Bosco Sodi, and Rusudan Khizanishvili—relationships that extend beyond single projects into long-term constellations of trust. Similarly, Dr. Aura Seikkula and I have been contemplating a project for years, and it appears it will soon materialize.
Equally thrilling is the prospect of discovering new terrains—Tbilisi, where I have already connected with multiple Georgian artists and curators, and Manila, where I was recently awarded a curatorial residency at Art Fair Philippines. Ultimately, what excites me is the possibility of dialogue: of creating contexts where aesthetics, beauty, and community emerge together.
Charles Moore: 24 Hour Interview is available through Mousse Publishing. The Lorax was on view through October 3, 2025 at LIC-A Art Space in Long Island City.
