Alison Croney Moses
August 6, 2025
Can you share a little about your background as a furniture maker?
I'm Guyanese American and grew up in North Carolina. I have all these memories of making from my childhood, making and craft—although we didn't necessarily call it “craft”. My mom mended our clothes, she made our skirts and dresses, we cooked, which I think is a craft, and my dad made some of the furniture in our home. I remember making hair bows that I would take to school and sell. I was the art kid. I found the art classroom to be a nurturing and inspiring space.
When it came time for college, I tried graphic design, but I hated it. My friends at the time were in the furniture department. What they were doing and learning looked like so much fun. Until then, I didn't really know you could actually study woodworking. I decided to switch and remember feeling such relief learning a craft using hand tools.
Do you see a connection between the subject matter of your work, namely motherhood and the body, and the medium of wood?
I think there are other materials that could work for me, but I dove into a material and the processes of working with that particular material rather than incorporating a variety of mediums into my practice. Woodworking is very complicated; it can take twenty steps to make one thing happen. Over the years, I have fallen in love with woodworking and the care with which you manipulate the material to make objects. Wood is life-giving. We cannot survive without trees. We're very much connected to this material.
My work has not always been about motherhood. It is about motherhood now because I’m finding that I have something to say about the experience of becoming a mother myself—of being a Black mother who has survived childbirth.
The pandemic heightened this feeling that I had something I needed to say. During that time when the world was shut down, we had the very public documentation and viewing of the murders of Black people. Everyone had slowed down enough to take note.
There was this spark in society—you could call it a racial awakening of white society or an awareness of what is part of the daily lives of Black folks and folks of color—that spread around us. This occurred when we felt trapped at home, especially while balancing work, childcare, having a family, and keeping ourselves sane. I had to say something.
The material of wood that I already understand is very much connected to the human body in many ways. When wood is cut down, it still moves depending on the climate. If it's humid or dry, a movement of the material and fibers occurs. Wood fibers do interesting things as you bend, peel, and shred them. Wood comes in different colors, just like humans. There are imperfections in wood. It has joints. There are all these aspects of wood that I started to contemplate as I was thinking about my own body, as someone who had grown and birthed humans and was now repairing myself.
As I worked on the Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births exhibition that I was commissioned for, I was able to dive into these themes of reframing our identities, using wood to think about the imperfections that are inherent in both humans and wood—although I prefer to say the perfections that are inherent in those things. That's where I really started to explore that material connection. Then my work began to take the shape of vessels. As mothers, we are vessels in very literal ways but also, maybe less literally, we can think about our communities in society as vessels.
You’ve said that focusing on Black joy is essential to your Triennial project. How does the vessel-like nature of your Triennial project provide a space for that? Its title, This Moment for Joy, demonstrates that the space you are creating is not only physical but also temporal.
During that first Designing Motherhood commission, I focused on representing my experience of motherhood through wooden sculptures and community building.
I met with Black mothers over Zoom, and then we met in person and talked about community building as a practice of building a vessel together, a conceptual vessel of friendship, a friendship that could hold joy, grief, and sorrow.
I then did another project called UnADULTerated Black Joy, which was shown at Piano Craft Gallery. Tanya Nixon-Silberg, Zahirah Nur Truth, and I invited Ekua Holmes and L’Merchie Frazier to join us to discuss and make artwork about Black girlhood and joy. How do we access that joy as Black women who also have the identity of mothers? How do you reconnect to carefree childhood joy? In a racist society, we can't lose sight of the freedom and real joy of Black children. We need to figure out how that continues into our adult lives.
For that exhibition, we held community gatherings where I started thinking directly about vessels that we build in physical form, vessels that are conceptual in form—emotional vessels. When you think about yourself as a vessel, all those complex ways that we need to cultivate, joy not just to survive but to thrive, you have to ask: What can my art do to cultivate that in communities? How do I feed it if it's already there? How do I help to create those sparks, not on my own, but with others, to be vibrant in community? I started by asking myself those questions for my Triennial project. I also needed to ask myself what the purpose of this structure is in a public space in Charlestown, in Boston, in Massachusetts, in the United States, and not separate it from all of that context.
Joy is what grabbed me, and I decided to hold on to it. Often, my need to hold on to things is what shows up in my work. And then it keeps showing up in the work. So This Moment for Joy is the idea that's fueling this structure. I have Black women on my mind as I make this work. But I recognize joy is not something that only we need. It's a public art piece that everyone will access, participate in, or interact with in some way. The care behind it is based on a need to call out Black women, Black mothers, Black folks in this time when we need joy. I asked myself: How do we create more spaces that are intentional about joy? Joy doesn't have to be buckets of laughter. Joy can be subtle. It can be about color and curves. It can just be about the attention it demands.
I see a very compelling dialog between protection and freedom in your Triennial project.
That’s interesting because I don’t use the word “freedom” in my project description. “Protection” is definitely included in the description, but the word “freedom” is probably your interpretation. Ever since I was a kid, I have liked to be in small cocooning spaces. I don't know if everybody feels that way, but I remember hiding in my closet as a kid and drawing on the walls or under the table with the tablecloth in the dining room and waiting for people's feet to come by, sometimes surprising them, sometimes just hiding. We would build forts too, although most of my forts ended up being little nooks that I would construct to artificially make a space smaller so that I could have a comforting, protective, nurturing feeling, like a womb.
Last night, my daughter and I were reading books together. I'm not a very physical person, but my daughter is. We were holding hands at one point with her head nestled under my arm, and I realized that she was trying to burrow into a cocoon-like space.
I think about that need for us, even as adults, to find comfort and protection in spaces. For my Triennial project, I thought a lot about how I could create a space like that without it feeling stifling or crushing. I find it interesting that you say freedom because I hadn't put freedom anywhere close to this idea. I was just at a talk by artist Robell Awake about his new book A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects, and he kept saying, “None of us are free”. We don't have human rights, as is being highlighted in this current political context. I don't think freedom has ever been pressing on my mind because I don't think I have ever felt truly free. But that’s not to say you cannot have joy. Yes, we all want to be free. What does freedom mean? We can have conversations about freedom, but in our actual daily lives, freedom is an illusion, right? That does not mean we should not be thriving in the structures in which we exist while trying to tear those structures down or change them.
This structure I'm creating for the Triennial is open yet closed, protective yet nurturing. It offers care without stifling you.
Do you see a relationship between play and joy?
When we did Unadulterated Black Joy, we brought Black moms together for activities like roller skating and hula hooping. We even took a silks class. One mom had just given birth, but she still showed up because she wanted to be in this space of laughter and physical joy.
I have produced a lot of sculptures about surgery repairing aspects of my body in order for me to physically access joy. For the Triennial, I’m thinking about how I can represent joy through an object that people interact with. My Triennial project is a structure that I hope people walk around, go inside of, and run their fingers along. There is color that will appear a little bit like a surprise. There is a curved element to it. Those are elements that I've used to represent joy in the past, and I wanted to hold on to those for this larger-scale project.
How do you hope people engage with your project in Charlestown?
I hope that when people interact with this structure, it brings a smile to their faces. I hope it produces a subtle connection to joy. I'm also hoping to gather people together to visit the site, eat food together, laugh together, and interact with each other in a way that builds relationships and connections. This is a physical space, but I’m intentionally using it to create an emotional space where joy can thrive and laughter and conversation can happen.