Listen with Your Eyes: A Moe Brooker Retrospective

Woodmere is proud to present Listen with Your Eyes, the inaugural retrospective dedicated to the work of Moe Brooker (1940–2022), one of Philadelphia's most beloved and visionary artists. The exhibition traces the full arc of his career, from his academic realist paintings of the 1960s through his incandescent abstract works, characterized by rainbow patchwork fields animated by sweeping calligraphic marks. Brooker drew on an exceptionally rich array of sources: the structure and tonalities of jazz music; the bright lights and graffiti of the Philadelphia cityscape; African and African-American weavings and quilts; and art-historical touchstones ranging from Giotto to Wassily Kandinsky and Hans Hofmann. Listen with Your Eyes also features a selection of Brooker's wall-mounted and freestanding sculptures, weavings, sketchbooks, and personal ephemera, offering an intimate window into the mind and practice of this extraordinary artist.

Listen With Your Eyes is supported by generous grants from the William Penn Foundation, the William M. King Charitable Foundation, and the Edna Wright Andrade Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation.

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The 2026 Fall Season of Friday Night Jazz is also inspired by Listen With Your Eyes, with each performance title corresponding with a different featured work by Moe Brooker. Explore the schedule and get tickets here.