Moore, John L. (African American, born 1939), Study for Kelly's Loft, 1984, acrylic on paper, 14.25 x 16 inches, signed Moore lower right. Framed in a silver metal frame measuring 23.25 x 22.25 inches. African-American Artist John L. Moore (so identified to not be confused with another New York artist, the realist John Moore), was born in Cleveland, Ohio on February 2nd, 1939 and now resides in Brooklyn, New York. The Cleveland Museum became important to his development. His mother was a government worker who divorced his father when he was six. He began taking art lessons as a junior-high age student at the Cleveland Museum of Art. After high school, he served in the US Army for three years (from 1958 to 1961) as a paratrooper. After his Military Service; in 1962 he took a position at General Motors; it was while working at GM he earned an undergraduate degree (B.F.A.) at Kent State University in 1972 and a graduate degree (M.A.) in 1974 and was just nine credits short of an M.F.A. In 1975 Moore to a teaching position at the Cleveland Museum of Art and at the time was one of the few African Americans employed by a major American museum. In 1983 Moore had his first one-person exhibition at the Alternative Museum in New York City with prompted his move there with his family in 1985. The concept of abstraction started when he was first airborne serving in the army. Prior to the military he had never been in an airplane. As a paratrooper ; from the sky ; he became fascinated by the patterns of the landscape. Its abstraction that rapidly became a reality as one floated closer to the earth. Since that time his paintings on canvas, and paper have become improvisational, mostly geometric shapes of clusters of ovals, triangles, and squares involving a process of painting, scraping, re painting, and blending colors of a restricted palette of shades of black, gray, white, red, and blue. The work of John L. Moore can be found in the permanent collections of museums around the globe including ; The Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Canton Museum of Art, The Columbus Museum of Art, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA , the Jersey City Museum , and the New Jersey State Museum, Miami University Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY , The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Queens Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, The Cleveland Public Library, The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Muscarelle Museum of Art at The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA ; The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and the List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T., Cambridge, MA .