NOMAD: Dominique Moody and the Assemblage of Home

By Kristine Schomaker

I keep thinking about Nomadland. Fern driving her van across that enormous American landscape. Not running from something. Moving toward something she could not quite name yet. That feeling of needing less. Of being, as Dominique Moody says, at home in the world.

NOMAD: Dominique Moody and the Assemblage of Home is on view at the Armory Arts Center in Pasadena through January 16, 2027, part of the year-long city celebration for the centennials of Route 66 and the Colorado Boulevard Bridge. Route 66. A nomadic road. A thread through the American landscape that has carried people toward something, opportunity, reinvention, escape, freedom, since 1926. The connection to Moody's practice is not incidental. It is the whole point.

Moody works at the intersection of assemblage, performance, and life. In tune with her ancestral diasporic kin from West Africa, her practice is an ode to more than sixty years of life as an urban nomad. She transforms salvaged wood, glass, metal, photographs, and found objects into works that hold traces of memory, movement, and lived experience. Her work is part of a long tradition of Black assemblage art rooted in the mid-twentieth-century history of South Los Angeles, the lineage of John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar, artists who made something extraordinary out of what the world threw away.

At the center of her practice is N.O.M.A.D. Narrative. Odyssey. Manifesting. Artistic. Dreams. A 1950 salvaged truck and trailer built from washing machine doors, corrugated metal, vintage barn wood, a bicycle rim, reclaimed wood, and collage panels. Home and studio. Artwork and vehicle. It has evolved over decades as a space for making and living, reflecting Moody's ongoing exploration of home, mobility, and self-determination.

The wall is the first thing I noticed. A large-scale architectural elevation drawing of the truck and trailer, 23 feet 3 and a half inches wide, precise and technical in its lines, layered throughout with silhouettes of people. A musician with an instrument. A child. A woman holding a baby. A figure at the door. Real human lives inhabiting the blueprint of a mobile home. The precision of the drawing and the intimacy of the silhouettes held together in the same image. The structure and the people inside it. Inseparable.

Elsewhere in the show a large hanging work on map collage carries an elevation drawing of the truck and trailer alongside an architectural rendering of a house, both floating on the geography of streets and routes. Small photographs hang from it on strings like memories dangling from a branch. Because they are.

And then the bottles. Corked glass bottles in deep cobalt blue, clear, olive green, each one tagged with a handwritten label that reads SWEAT EQUITY. A small vintage key hangs from one. Los Angeles, 1996. The sweat equity of living here. Of working here. Of being here. Each bottle holds a little liquid, a little light. Each one is a year, a place, a body that showed up and put something in.

I stood in front of those bottles for a long time. Where does your sweat equity go? We pour ourselves into places and people and work and movement. What remains. What do we carry. What gets left behind.

One earlier piece, My Road to Freedom from 2009, says so much in such a small form. A cardboard shoebox, a vintage metal roller skate, raffia, found objects, map collage. Eight by twelve by six inches. In the collection of Dr. Joy Simmons. The wall text describes it as beginning with Moody's childhood memory of metal roller skates, her lifelong love of things that move on wheels. A shoebox turned tiny house in motion. It points to ideas that later became central to N.O.M.A.D. Mobility as independence, home as something that can travel, and the freedom that can come from moving through the world.

Moody's own story has always been nomadic. Born in Augsburg, Germany to two African-American parents, her father a military officer who chose to stay in Europe because he felt it was too toxic for a Black man in the States, she grew up moving constantly. Germany, then Philadelphia, then New York at sixteen as an emancipated minor, then San Francisco, then Los Angeles. This is almost her fiftieth address. Not instability. Practice.

Both self-taught and formally educated, she attended Pratt Institute and later graduated from UC Berkeley with a Phi Beta Kappa Honor in Fine Art Practice in 1991, receiving the Maybelle Toombs Award. At 28 she was diagnosed as legally blind. She has said it changed her eyesight but not her artistic vision. Assemblage pushed her into using objects whose details and narratives already existed, so she could make new narratives from them. Her hardware store is her candy store.

Her work is in public and private collections throughout the United States and abroad. Over the past twenty-five years she has exhibited at the California African American Museum, Craft Contemporary, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the National Museum of Mexican-American Art in Chicago, the Japanese American National Museum, the Skirball Cultural Center, and the Watts Towers Arts Center, as well as galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Berlin. She has received grants from the California Community Foundation, Finding Family Stories, and the Seen and Heard Foundation.

I have to be honest. There is a version of my life I return to sometimes. Living out of a van or a trailer or a small rented room in a rotating cast of cities. I have friends who actually do this. Who decided at some point that the fixed life was not the life for them. Who move through the world with what fits in a car and seem, from where I stand, genuinely free.

I grew up for a time in a mobile home. My parents had divorced and my mom moved us into one, a large one in a community with a pool and other kids our age. It was a transition in our lives. But it was also just home. There was nothing lesser about it. There was a community there, neighbors who knew each other, kids running between yards, a sense of belonging that had nothing to do with whether the structure was on a foundation.

I think about that a lot in front of Moody's work. The way we have been taught to rank homes. To see the mobile home or the trailer or the van as a temporary state, something to move through on the way to something more permanent and therefore more real. But what if the movement is the point. What if home is not the destination but the practice of making somewhere yours, for however long you are there.

There are whole communities built around this now. Solo Travel for Women Over 50, where women share routes and encouragement and the radical idea that you can go anywhere on your own terms. And then there are the traditions that predate all of that by thousands of years. Mongolian nomads folding and moving their gers with the seasons. Bedouin communities of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. The Sámi people of northern Scandinavia following the reindeer. And Moody's own ancestral connection to the nomadic diasporic traditions of West Africa, a lineage she names explicitly as part of what her practice draws from.

Nomadism is not a trend. It is a human inheritance. The fixed house, the permanent address, the owning of land, these are relatively new in the long story of how people move through the world.

In a recent interview Moody talked about what the themes of her work are today. Placement. How people engage with the work in a way that they recognize not just the narrative the piece is speaking but their own narrative inside it. That is when she feels she has truly made something. When someone comes to her and says the impact was that they suddenly saw their own story.

That is the work I want to stand next to.

She also said something about art and life that I have not stopped thinking about. That for her there is no separation between the two. That art has become commodified as a product and her sixty years of practice do not fit that model. Her bottom line is never whether the work will sell. Her bottom line is whether the art can move somebody.

I want to frame that and put it on every studio wall I know.

This show does what the best art does. It takes the personal and makes it large enough to hold other people inside it. Home is not a place. It is an accumulation of materials, memories, relationships, and stories, something capable of being carried forward even as the places around us change.

Those sweat equity bottles with their handwritten tags and their little keys. Someone was here. They worked here. They lived here. They moved on.

Where does your sweat equity go.

NOMAD: Dominique Moody and the Assemblage of Home is on view at the Armory Arts Center, 145 N. Raymond Ave, Pasadena, through January 16, 2027. More at armoryarts.org and dominiquemoody.com. Curated by Taylor Bythewood-Porter.

Photos by Kristine Schomaker