There is something quietly radical about embroidery, a craft historically confined to parlors and trousseau chests, stitched by women as acts of domestic devotion. Adam Jon Moore has taken that tradition and unraveled it completely, restringing the needle with desire, longing, and an unabashed celebration of queer male sexuality. The result is a body of work that is as technically meticulous as it is emotionally daring.
We are thrilled to feature Adam in Issue 5 of Inspiró Magazine.
A Journey Built in Layers
Adam's creative life did not begin with a needle and hoop. Having called New York City home for more than 25 years, his artistic path has been anything but linear. He studied ceramic sculpture and design in the early 2000s, then pivoted to industrial machine knitting in 2010, a skill that led him into the world of menswear and womenswear production, and deepened his love for the tactile properties of fiber and textile. Tapestry and hand embroidery entered the picture next, drawing him ever closer to the intimate, labor-intensive work he makes today.
Knitting gave way to weaving, weaving gave way to cross stitch, and cross stitch gave way to hand embroidery, which Adam has made his primary medium since 2016. Each step in that evolution left a fingerprint. You can feel the textile designer's eye in his compositions, the knitter's patience in the hours he logs on each piece, the sculptor's sense of dimension in his growing use of resin and paint.
Desire Made Tangible
Then came the pandemic, and with it, eighteen months away from work, from touch, from the ordinary intimacies most of us took for granted. For Adam, that enforced stillness cracked something open.
An international long-distance marriage. Social distancing. Desires with nowhere to go. What couldn't be lived was dreamed, and what was dreamed found its way to canvas. Adam began making work rooted explicitly in homoeroticism, not as provocation, but as personal necessity. The pieces that emerged were honest maps of his own fantasies, cravings, and the ache of longing.
What makes Adam's work so striking is precisely this refusal to fictionalize or soften. The men in his embroideries are present in a way that feels physical, muscular, charged, deeply seen. Titles like Daddy's Home!, Bathhouse, Gripped, and Worshipped don't leave much to interpretation, and that is entirely the point. His ongoing Julius series, which stretches across years and dozens of pieces, functions almost like a visual journal, a recurring cast of desire rendered in cotton, silk, and poly thread on cotton canvas.
As Adam puts it: "What I portray in my pieces is a personal exploration of my own fantasies, desires, and cravings."
The Art of Tribute and Collaboration
Adam's influences are worn proudly. His work includes tributes to homoerotic icons Tom of Finland and Gengoroh Tagame, artists who, each in their own era, insisted on depicting queer male sexuality with power and joy. Translating their bold, graphic imagery into the painstaking language of embroidery is itself a statement: these images are worth the hours, worth the intimacy of the process.
Collaboration is another throughline in his practice. Adam has worked with illustrators, digital artists, and photographers across continents, a global series of creative partnerships that have produced some of his most layered pieces. Taste Me!, made with Spanish digital artist @alo_alo_y_alo, clocked in at fifty hours of stitching. Fix Hell, adapted from an original drawing by the artist @fix.hell, was a month-long project totaling seventy-five hours of work. These aren't quick impressions; they are sustained, deliberate acts of co-creation.
His piece Lover's Caress, roughly one hundred hours of hand embroidery, took second place at the 2023 It Was All Very Queer group show at the St. Louis Artists Guild, juried by Brandon Anschultz, out of more than two hundred submitted works. The recognition was well-earned, and a reminder that queer fine craft belongs in institutional spaces, not just in the margins.
Breaking the Frame
In recent years, Adam has been pushing his practice into uncharted territory. Embroidery, for most practitioners, begins and ends with thread. Adam has started to ask: what if it doesn't?
His Bara series introduced epoxy resin into the work, a material choice that is both technical and conceptual. In pieces like Drip! and BUKAKKE!, he wanted liquid to look like liquid, to actually catch the light, to feel present on the surface of the canvas. Thread alone couldn't do that. Resin could. The result was something new: embroidery that had dimension and physical presence beyond what the fiber itself could achieve.
From there, the materials have kept expanding. Watercolor washes, acrylic paint, layered mixed media, Adam is actively dismantling the boundaries of what fiber art is supposed to be. Pieces like Tentacles?! and It's Over?! now combine cotton, silk, and poly thread with watercolor, acrylic paint, and epoxy resin on cotton canvas, each element chosen to serve the vision rather than to fit a category.
"Mixed media is where I see my journey taking me," Adam says, "and there truly is no limit or subject matter off the table."
Why It Matters
Queer art has always had to fight for its right to exist, to be seen as art first, and not merely as transgression. Adam Jon Moore's embroideries belong to a longer lineage: from Tom of Finland's defiant leather men to the tender domestic subversions of fiber artists who placed queer love in the most traditional of crafts. His work is explicit, yes. It is also skilled, considered, and deeply human.
There is something moving about the medium itself, the hours required, the repetition of the stitch, the fact that each piece is the result of sustained, embodied attention. In a world that often treats queer desire as something to be hidden, minimized, or aestheticized into palatability, Adam's work insists on presence. His figures are not hidden. They are not apologetic. They are, stitch by painstaking stitch, made real.
Explore Adam's work at adamjonmoore.com and follow him on Bluesky at @adamworks.bsky.social.
Adam Jon Moore is featured in Inspiró Magazine Issue 5. Pick up your copy today.
