Alfred McMoore loved nothing more than a great funeral. Except for maybe drawing that funeral from memory, in intricate detail.
Funerals and death were the biggest themes for the late McMoore, a self-taught Akron artist who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He expressed himself by drawing funeral scenes and other images with pencil and crayon on huge scrolls of paper that were 5 feet high and up to 50 feet long.
Akron Art Museum curator Wendy Earle talks about the exhibit “Alfred McMoore: All This Luck in My Head,” opening Sept. 20.
McMoore died in 2009 at age 59. Now, the community can see and learn about his unique perspectives on life with the show “Alfred McMoore: All This Luck in My Head” at the Akron Art Museum, which opens this weekend and continues through Feb. 8, 2026.
The exhibit is part of the museum’s mission to highlight Akron artists, especially during the city’s bicentennial.
A drawing by late Akron artist Alfred McMoore reads “From Alfred To Chuck For Art Muezim.” The late Chuck Auerbach was a champion of McMoore’s work.
McMoore, known as a professional mourner, was a regular at funerals at Stewart & Calhoun Funeral Home in Akron for years, where he wept for strangers. He’d call the funeral home and ask, “Is it gonna be a big funeral? Are there going to be one million roses?” said museum exhibition curator Wendy Earle.
McMoore referred to funerals, where everybody had a role and the deceased was being honored, as his favorite sport. They also were a source of catharsis, comfort and inspiration for the artist, Earle said.
Religious figures and people representing law enforcement are also dominant themes in McMoore’s art. That includes everything from Jesus playing a guitar to a sheriff’s deputy wearing red lipstick, high heels and dangling earrings.
Community Support Services security guard Darrell Hill (from left), LeBron James, Jesus and the Goodyear blimp are featured in a drawing in the exhibit “Alfred McMoore: All This Luck in My Head,” which was being installed at the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, Sept. 12, 2025.
In his drawings, McMoore often depicted people he loved in caskets and also drew choirs, mourners in their Sunday best and elaborate lamps.
“He had this cast of characters that he would draw again and again,” Earle said.
If McMoore drew you in a casket, you were very important to him, Earle said. People who were still alive, including his beloved sister Evelina Honorable Johnson, were even pictured in caskets in his drawings.
One of former Beacon Journal reporter Jim Carney’s photos of Alfred McMoore from 2000 is reproduced on a 16-foot wall in the exhibit “Alfred McMoore: All This Luck in My Head.”
Earle said McMoore likely worked on his scrolls a couple feet at a time.
“Once he created a scroll, he wasn’t super concerned with what happened to it,” she said. “It was the process, not the product for him.”
How Chuck Auerbach met Alfred McMoore
The late art collector Chuck Auerbach of Akron learned about McMoore’s work — which falls in the “outsider art” category of artists with no academic training — from a nursing student who was a friend of the family. Auerbach contacted McMoore through his caseworker.
Auerbach supported McMoore’s artistic career, getting him art supplies and helping him sell his work everywhere from the Akron Art Museum to a gallery in New York.
Akron Art Museum curator Wendy Earle talks about one of the late Akron artist Alfred McMoore’s huge drawings on scrolls Sept. 12, 2025. The art piece will be featured in the upcoming exhibit “Alfred McMoore: All This Luck in My Head.”
In 1995, the Akron Art Museum acquired an untitled drawing by McMoore, which the museum refers to as “Portrait of Sheriff Bobby Joe McDermot” and Auerbach also donated a large scroll to the museum referred to as “Funeral Scene for Sylvester Beasley.”
The latter work, which is 5 feet tall and 45 feet long, has never been displayed before and is making its debut in “All This Luck in My Head.”
Fourteen of the McMoore works in the show, including massive scrolls and smaller drawings, are on loan from the Auerbach family. “All This Luck in My Head” features seven of McMoore’s massive scroll works, 10 of his smaller drawings and a number of photos and ephemera.
The scrolls are installed with magnets, metal brackets and mylar behind each magnet to protect the paper.
A portion of a large pencil drawing is seen at the exhibit “Alfred McMoore: All This Luck in My Head,” opening at the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, Sept. 20, 2025.
Meaning of title ‘All This Luck in My Head’
McMoore, who lived for 13 years at several psychiatric institutions, later lived independently with the help of Community Support Services.
The exhibition title “All This Luck in My Head” is a phrase that McMoore used often to express gratitude. That includes when retired Beacon Journal reporter Jim Carney, who wrote a Sunday Beacon Magazine piece on McMoore in 2000, brought him his favorite things. Among the items: Diet Coke, Rite Guard deodorant, pipe tobacco, paper and 96-count boxes of Crayola crayons, which included McMoore’s favorite denim blue color.
“What I find beautiful about Alfred was that he had a very tough life being institutionalized a long time and surviving with a very serious mental illness diagnosis, schizophrenia,” Carney said in a phone interview Sept. 15. “But he was a very grateful guy.”
Former Beacon Journal reporter Jim Carney took this photo of artist Alfred McMoore as he was getting to know him for a story in 2000.
Carney met McMoore through Auerbach, his Akron neighbor, who suggested that writing about the self-taught, prolific artist would be a great story. While spending time with McMoore, Carney took his own photos of him, which are in the museum exhibit.
“The ones that are my favorites are the ones of him drawing on the floor in fetal position. It’s kind of mind-blowing,” Carney said.
Former Beacon Journal reporter Jim Carney captured artist Alfred McMoore drawing while lying on the floor in 2000.
Carney enjoyed watching the left-handed artist at work.
“I think he just sort of got in a zone. It was magical to watch him. He had a vision of what he was trying to do,” Carney said. “I know he was called to draw.”
Black Keys connection
Auerbach and Carney’s sons, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, named their band The Black Keys in 2001 from a phrase that McMoore often repeated when he left voicemails for their fathers. He’d say “This is Alfred McMoore. Your black key is taking too long,” possibly indicating that something wasn’t quite right.
Carney said that the artist would also say, “You’re a D flat” on his voicemail if he was miffed.
The Black Keys also named their music publishing company McMoore McLesst Publishing as a tribute to McMoore, who sometimes referred to himself as McMoore McLesst.
Just Asking: How did The Black Keys get their name? Here’s the full story behind it
McMoore known around town
McMoore was a very short, small man who always wore a suit, hat and tie — often several suits at once.
In “All This Luck in My Head,” a series of fun-loving photographs by Chuck Auerbach in front of his home shows McMoore and Chuck’s then-teenage son Dan swapping Alfred’s coats with each other.
Some folks theorize that the artist always wore a suit in order to be taken seriously. Curator Earle said others believed he wore several suits at once so he wouldn’t look as small.
A short biography about Akron artist Alfred McMoore and a photo by Timothy Barrage are displayed in “Alfred McMoore: All This Luck in My Head,” which will run Sept. 20 to Feb. 8, 2026, at the Akron Art Museum.
People knew or recognized McMoore all over Akron, including police officers who saw him on his bike with his art scrolls, bus drivers, Harry Ruppel at Ruppel Art & Paint Supply, employees at CSS and people at the Goodwill store where he got his suits.
“He was a guy that was watched over by the community in a certain way,” Carney said.
Akron Art Museum curator Wendy Earle discusses Sept. 12, 2025, how self-taught Akron artist Alfred McMoore pieced one of his enormous drawings together.
McMoore’s own funeral in 2009 drew nearly 300 mourners at Stewart & Calhoun. Carney remembers talking to late Akron Deputy Mayor Dorothy Jackson at McMoore’s calling hours, where she said that he had come to calling hours for everyone in her family, so she wanted to go to his.
Interactive exhibit elements
“All This Luck in My Head” has an interactive element, where guests can sit at a drawing table and create their own art project. Spaces in the middle of the galleries also have been created as seating areas that evoke a funeral parlor, with couches and vintage lamps from the Bomb Shelter in Akron.
A 51-minute documentary by Todd Volkmer, “Outside In: The Life and Art of Alfred McMoore,” also will play on a continuous loop. The documentary, created in 2010, is making its Akron screening debut.
Also in the exhibit is the video “Alfred McMoore Memorial Concert” provided by Eric Vaughn. The Black Keys performed in the memorial concert at Musica in November 2009, a couple months after McMoore’s death. The event raised $20,000 for The Black Keys Alfred McMoore Memorial Fund established in 2010 at the Akron Community Foundation to benefit Community Support Services, which helped McMoore with his mental health issues.
A promo poster for the Black Keys’ benefit concert after artist Alfred McMoore’s death in 2009 is part of the “Alfred McMoore: All This Luck in My Head” exhibit opening Sept. 20.
Chuck Auerbach, who died March 29 in Nashville, owned many of the prolific McMoore’s works. Mary Auerbach, his wife, said by phone Sept. 15 that a good 120 of them remain in the basement of their Akron home.
She said McMoore had a compulsion to draw.
“It was a way that he made his life real,” she recalled. “It was something that kept him engaged … He was consumed by the visual overload of the world.”
Chuck’s goal was to safeguard McMoore’s scrolls in the hopes that the artist would become known in the future.
“He (Chuck) would have been absolutely thrilled and delighted because he really loved Alfred,” Mary said of the artist’s “All This Luck in My Head” show.
Jim Carney will speak at the exhibition preview Sept. 19 and McMoore’s nephew, Ricky Honorable, also will attend.
“In my own life, the way I was introduced to him, it made a big difference to me. I really enjoyed being around the guy,” Carney said. “I wrote about a lot of people over the time at the paper and there was nobody as interesting as Alfred.”
Arts and restaurant writer Kerry Clawson may be reached at 330-996-3527 or kclawson@thebeaconjournal.com.
Details
Preview party: “Alfred McMoore: All This Luck In My Head”
When: 7 to 8:30 p.m. Sept. 19
Where: Akron Art Museum, 1 S. High St., Akron
Reservations: akronartmuseum.org/media/events/exhibition-opening-alfred-mcmoore-all-this-luck-in-my-head/
Cost: Free for members; $20 for non-members
Information: 330-376-9186 or akronartmuseum.org
Exhibition: Sept. 20, 2025 – Feb. 8, 2026
This story has been updated to correct a misspelling.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Akron Art Museum celebrates homegrown artist Alfred McMoore
