Frank C. Moore II was a New York-based painter, winner of the Logan Medal of the Arts, and a member of the Visual AIDS Artist Caucus—the organization responsible for the Ribbon Project, A Day Without Art, and A Night Without Light.
Moore's father, Earle K. Moore, was a communications and civil rights lawyer in Manhattan, who won a landmark case establishing that broadcast stations must serve the interests of their viewers. His sister, Rebecca Moore, would later become a computer scientist, environmentalist, and founder of Google Earth Outreach. Frank Moore was born in Manhattan in 1953, then moved with his family to Long Island, N.Y., first to Great Neck, and then to Roslyn, where he first attended Roslyn Junior High School. He graduated from Roslyn High School in 1971, where he had been active in student politics and served as class president. Moore's work was selected for display for years in the high school halls. They were eventually removed during a renovation and subsequently lost.
He attended Yale, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1975, and he studied at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris from 1977 to 1979.