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Jesse Sugar Moore was shocked when his father, Dusty Moore, texted him a photo of his bare ass.
It wasn’t the photo itself that shocked Sugar Moore, a DJ and co-owner of the vintage boutique Broken Dreams on Northeast Alberta Street. It was how the photo was presented: as a grayscale painting, attached to WW’s breaking story about artist Phyllis Yes and her controversial exhibition Dusty…at Home.
Later, a friend showed Sugar Moore a clipping of the same WW article at a party, unaware that Sugar Moore’s father was the painting’s subject. The experience unnerved him.
“I was like, are you fucking with me? He’s never met, he doesn’t know my dad,” Sugar Moore says over phở on a Thursday night.
Yes’ photos were family lore to Sugar Moore. He heard about the photos growing up, that his father posed naked for some postcards. He thought the story was a tall tale that lived in the past. Up until WW’s story came out, Sugar Moore was unaware of Yes and her artistry. Since publication, the story has received a wide response, with readers from across the country reaching out to Yes to purchase paintings from the exhibit.
For Sugar Moore, it’s been “surreal” to see his father’s legend not only validated, but reported as newsworthy. He’s still trying to make sense of why people find his indirect connection to Yes’ art interesting.
“He’s a man of many stories, and it’s a story he would tell,” Sugar Moore says. “It’s this piece of my childhood coming back to the surface 20, 30 years later.”
After seeing Dusty…at Home, Sugar Moore met Yes and heard about her experiences with his father. He felt it was uncanny how her show at the Water Tower was so close to one of his former regular routes to work.
Sugar Moore’s father and Yes’ model Dusty now lives in Arizona, having left a job at the Department of Agriculture—not the CIA or the Pentagon, as Yes initially thought—to sew sailing canvases and carve wooden flutes. Sugar Moore opened Broken Dreams after time spent in teaching and tech.
“Seeing him gives me this different sense of him as a person,” Sugar Moore says. “It shows me this part of his life that I didn’t exist when it was happening. To talk to Phyllis about it and get this sense of their interactions before I existed, and to hear the details of it—he took it very seriously, it wasn’t posing or smiling or winking or anything. He was very casual but also serious about this modeling job.”
Sugar Moore recently visited Yes’ exhibit and purchased a matted print from Yes’ original ’70s photos of his father that the paintings are based on.
“They’re beautiful photographs,” Sugar Moore says. “Some of them, especially, the way he is built as a person, as a young man, is very beautiful and the way she captured it is gorgeous. It has this classical look to it, almost classical Renaissance sculpture physique going on,”
Visitors can catch Yes’ exhibit at the Water Tower until June 26. Yes confirmed via email to WW that Dusty…at Home is her last public art show before she starts writing her memoirs in July, but clarified that she will have new museum exhibitions unveiling for the next several years.
“She told me this is the most fun show she’s ever had, which, wow, what an honor to be part of that, to be this close to it in some funny way,” Sugar Moore says.