The torch has been passed.
Although Pat Moore is no longer with us, her spirit, her creativity and her artist’s eye for talent of others still live on for future generations.
Her death earlier this month ended her lifelong devotion to art and artists. Yet her life-force and her artist’s eye still remain with us in the works of gifted students such as Janet Amuh, 18, of Flossmoor, who took classes with Moore for 10 years and who will attend the School of the Art Institute in Chicago on a four-year Presidential Scholarship.
Amuh, who just graduated from Homewood-Flossmoor High School, began taking classes with Pat Moore when she was 8 years old. It was a teacher-pupil connection that has shaped the life of a student and permanently etched the memory of a great teacher.
Summer art classes held on Thursday and Saturday, connected Amuh to the comprehensive world of art.
“She brought in artists to inspire us,” Amuh said. “She would bring in books and people without ever taking a field trip.”
“She was an extraordinary teacher,” said Janet’s mother, Shelley Amuh, who praised Moore’s encouraging style and her dedication to both art and artists.
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In recent years, young Janet took first place in a Black Creative Art exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and her artwork, which peppers almost every room of the Amuh house on Cambridge Avenue, displays both her talent and drive.
Janet Amuh says her art is focused on the “Black experience,” from a finger-painted self-portrait to both pen-and-ink visions and intensely colored creations including her “Portrait of a White Man,” which she says can be viewed as a shape-shifting view of the world, a colorful display of colors but with the exclusion of the color black.
Pat Moore’s artworks are glissandos of bold colors and rhapsodies of form on large canvases. The linking of music in her art is because “she liked to paint while listening to classical music,” said Amuh. Moore once said that both Bach and jazz were her musical influences.
By the time she was 7, Pat Moore was taking art lessons at the old Park Forest Art Center.
“I always knew I was going to be a painter,” she once said.
Her works hang in numerous permanent collections in the Chicago area and, in 1997, one of her paintings was selected by the National Easter Seal Society as a stamp, so more than 14 million households in this country saw her art.
Large abstracts were her forte and listening to the music of Bach or jazz made her creative juices flow.
She never stopped painting and teaching, leading programs at the Glenwood School and engaging in numerous public art projects for Park Forest. In 2018, the village chose one of her art works for the vehicle sticker.
In 2019, she received the Creative Arts Award from the South Suburban Small Business Association.
It was common knowledge that Pat Moore ate, slept and breathed art.
“Pat had one of the most impressive commitments to art,” said Kate Patterson, the executive director of the Tall Grass Art Center, the outgrowth of the old Park Forest Art Center.
“She taught somewhere almost every day, she had her own studio and painted in the evenings and into the night. She was helpful and inspirational. She would improve your work and she made sure her students received recognition for their creative ability.”
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Her work as an artist-teacher was boundless, ranging from the Tall Grass Arts Association, the Union Street Gallery and the Flossmoor Public Library. As well as having a studio in downtown Park Forest, she helped found the Salon Artist Gallery in Park Forest, which is a co-op for artists.
“The Salon Gallery was her baby,” said artist Marilyn Stewart.
Although some believed it to be a one-woman show, Stewart said some 15 artists voted to take control of the gallery and keep it doors open at least four days a week.
The Tall Grass Art Center will have a tribute to Pat Moore’s life in art and her contribution to the artistic welfare of the community during the annual Park Forest Art Fair in mid-September.
As an artist Pat Moore was a great teacher and as a teacher she was a great artist.
Jerry Shnay is a freelance columnist for the Daily Southtown.
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