Joan Moment

Joan Moment (born 1938) is an American painter based in Northern California. She emerged from the 1960s Northern California Funk art movement and gained attention when the Whitney Museum of American Art Curator Marcia Tucker selected her for the 1973 Biennial and for a solo exhibition at the Whitney in 1974. Moment is known for process-oriented paintings that employ non-traditional materials and techniques evoking vital energies (biological, sexual, cosmic) conveyed through archetypal iconography. Though briefly aligned with Funk—which was often defined by ribald humor and irreverence toward art-world pretensions—her work diverged by the mid-1970s, fusing abstraction and figuration in paintings that writers compared to prehistoric and tribal art. Critic Victoria Dalkey wrote that Moment's methods combined chance and improvisation to address "forces embodied in a universe too large for us to comprehend, as well as the ... fragility and transience of the material world."

In addition to the Whitney, Moment has exhibited at the Oakland Museum, Crocker Art Museum and Long Beach Museum of Art. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Crocker and Oakland Museums, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the City of Sacramento, among others. She lives in Sacramento and is professor emerita at California State University, Sacramento.