Dominic Timothy Moulden is a visual storyteller for the people. As a photographer-griot, he has journeyed to Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and South Africa to capture story-images of Black resistance and home. He also uses his camera to document Black presence and decry displacement at home in Baltimore. His work is united by its unblinking witness to the tenuousness of Black sanctuary throughout the diaspora.
It all began when Moulden left for Ethiopia with a friend’s advice echoing in his ears: “Don’t think about it, just take pictures.” When he returned to the U.S. with his photo-chronicles and saw how they affected people, an artistic awakening bloomed in him. Several art talks and exhibits later, his creative approach continues to be marked by spontaneity and accessibility. He firmly believes art is for everyone and access to beauty is our birthright.
Appropriately enough, Moulden’s first exhibit was at DC’s Sankofa Gallery. Sankofa, in the Akan language of Ghana, means you can go back and get it. Moulden’s portraits are intended to remind Black people of their beauty, against the forces of forgetfulness--ie, colonialism and racism. Re-member what has been dis(re)membered, you can hear Moulden’s images whisper if you lean in close enough.
Moulden’s work has also been exhibited at Artspace (Washington, DC), Studio 21 Gallery (Washington, DC), MICA Place (Baltimore, MD) and was shortlisted for the Baltimore Museum of Art’s new Interactive Exhibition Gallery. He was a collaborator in Spotless, an exhibition on whitewashing and gentrification, at Hamiltonian Gallery (Washington, DC). More recently his images have been exhibited at Baltimore’s FenZoul Gallery in the 2022 Black History Month show entitled Life is Resistance and Resistance is Life. As an “artivist,” he participated in the “Black and Palestinian Solidarity: The Path to Liberation” panel of The Museum of the Palestinian People. Moulden has also presented his literary art at the University of Orange’s “What’s the Story?” memoir reading. With his work in private collections, he has taught in MICA’s Community Arts Program for seven years; he was the featured speaker for its POWER Speaker Series in March 2022, with his talk, “Black Power=Black Love: Story, Art, and Photography.”