Individual Project: Week 11 Contemporary Art and Issues

Week 11: Contemporary Art and Issues

Karen Kramer

Collage IX: Landscape, 1974

George Morrison (Grand Portage Anishinaabe, 1919 - 2000)

Wood

60 1/8 x 168 1/2 x 3 inches

$75,000

Abstract Painting No. 2, 1950

George Morrison (Grand Portage Anishinaabe, 1919 - 2000)

Acrylic and oil on canvas

39.9 x 50.1 inches

$65,000

Description and Importance of Work:

Two rare works by George Morrison, Grand Portage Anishinaabe artist who came of age in New York in the 1950s and 60s, are available for acquisition: a large-scale wood collage (1974) and an abstract painting (1950). 

Harvard Art Museum should acquire both of these phenomenal examples by this renowned artist. By doing so, HAM will begin to place Indigenous art from North America in conversation with American art, as well as painting and collage traditions across space and time. 

These works, both in excellent condition, fit seamlessly into the overall HAM collection, and demonstrate that Native American artists have been producing work of the highest caliber that is at once modern and vital to telling a fuller story of American art history. These works are exemplars of not only how boldly he charted his own path but also how he expressed himself as a contemporary Indigenous artist.  His path, and body of art, inspired a new generation of Indian painters and sculptors.

George Morrison’s work could rotate immediately into the HAM: Level 1, Room 1110, Modern and Contemporary Art, Mid–century Abstraction II Gallery. On view in that space currently is Louise Nevelson’s sculpture Total Totality II (1958-1969). The two were close friends, and it would be rich to come full circle and begin a broader art historical dialogue through these works. 

Brief Biography:

As a child, Morrison showed considerable artistic aptitude. Following Grand Marais High School studying industrial arts, he attended what is now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and graduated in 1943 with a full scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York City.

In New York, Morrison embraced a Modernist style that revealed the influences of Cubist, Surrealist and Expressionist artists such as Joan Miró, Arshile Gorky and Adolph Gottlieb, whose work triggered the nascent Abstract Expressionism movement. He also became aware of how African and American Indian art influenced early Modernists such as Picasso. He worked and exhibited with Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, and other well-known Abstract Expressionists and avant-garde artists of the time. 

The art movement he identified with was led by a small and insular circle of artists—women and people of color were generally excluded, with few exceptions. Morrison’s work was at odds with the expectations of Native American art at the time, which demanded more stereotypically “Indian” markers and motifs seen through ceramics, textiles, and stylized paintings of ritual and everyday life, usually taking place in the past. Morrison’s abstract canvases contained no visible elements of “traditional” Native art. 

In 1952-53, a Fulbright scholarship took Morrison to France, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Université de Aix-Marseilles. By the late 1950s, he had established his Abstract Expressionist style, a path he continued throughout his career. In 1963, he became Assistant Professor of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design. One summer in the 1960s, he discovered Provincetown and its prolific beaches and their horizon lines, as well as a flourishing artist colony. On its sandy beaches he began to collect driftwood, a material that became the touchstone of his late 1960s and 1970s work.

In 1970, Morrison returned back to Minneapolis, teaching studio art and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He said that one of the main reasons that we returned was to gain a fuller sense of his identity. He eventually bought land near his birthplace, building a home and studio by Lake Superior. He spent most of his time there after his retirement in 1983, prolifically assembling totemic sculptures and making horizon-line paintings and collages. 

JOEY MCLEISTER • STAR TRIBUNE FILE