Left: Jazz guitarist Briand Morrison of Grand Portage performed June 15, 2013 at the Donaldson Hotel in Fargo, North Dakota prior to the opening of a two-year crosscountry exhibit of the work of his father, the late artist George Morrison. Above: Morrison’s 1949 watercolor and crayon piece, Sun and River, includes the distinctive horizon line that was characteristic of his work.
Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison is on a journey. The exhibit of Chippewa City native George Morrison (1919- 2000) was launched at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota on June 16, 2013 on a journey that will traverse the country until its closing in May 2015.
The collection of approximately 80 of Morrison’s drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures, according to the Minnesota Museum of American Art, merges “abstraction, landscape, and spiritual reflection” and draws from the places that impacted the artist most – the cities in which he studied, created, and taught art and the North Shore of Lake Superior, where he finished his career at Red Rock, his studio and home in Grand Portage.
Morrison’s art
Quoted on the Minnesota Museum of American Art website was exhibit curator W. Jackson Rushing III, Adkins presidential professor/Carver chair in Native American art at the University of Oklahoma: “George Morrison was both a major American modernist and an influential Indian artist whose beautiful images and objects have inspired generations of viewers, including younger artists. His later paintings especially are imbued with what he called inherent Indian values, affirming the importance of place.”
Morrison’s work was not what some people expected from an Ojibwe artist, however. According to the Museum of Modern American Art, “…Because Morrison’s artwork typically does not include overt references to his Indian heritage, it has stirred debate about what it means to be a Native American artist.”
Morrison’s signature style features abstract and geometric shapes that convey spiritual themes in nature. “His paintings and wood collages contain abstract images of trees, rocks, rivers, and sky,” according to the Plains Art Museum website. “A repeating theme in his work is the horizon line, a long-time fascination for the artist. He based his painting, drawings, wood collages, and sculptures on it.”
The Museum of Modern American Art website talks about how Morrison’s later works were inspired in part by his home on Lake Superior: “This body of work includes line drawings on colored papers, sketches of constellations over Lake Superior, and several paintings of forms breaking up in front of the abstracted shoreline. In terms of technique, these later paintings – quiet, lyrical, and meditative – synthesize Impressionism with Expressionism, while retaining the artist’s trademark representation of nature, land, and the horizon.”
Many places
After growing up in Grand Portage and graduating from Grand Marais High School, Morrison attended the Minneapolis College of Art Design, graduating in 1943. From there, he was awarded scholarships – including a Fulbright Scholarship — and a fellowship that allowed him to travel New York City and Europe and delve deeply into modern art, something his instructors in Minneapolis did not encourage.
Morrison taught in many places, including the Minneapolis School of Art, Iowa State College, Cornell University in New York, Pennsylvania State University, the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio, the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Minnesota.
Morrison’s work has been exhibited at many prestigious museums, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Plains Art Museum in Fargo; the Heard Museum in Phoenix; New York City’s Grand Central Modern Gallery, Touchstone Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of the American Indian; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. One of his large sculptures was exhibited at the White House.
Morrison’s legacy
Morrison befriended other prominent artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. His work contributed significantly to the genre of Abstract Expressionism but also includes elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism. He would later become known as a founder of Native American Modernism.
“His award-winning collages, which he meticulously constructed from found and imported woods, and his monumental totems were unique contributions to 20th-century modernism and are widely collected,” according to the Museum of Modern American Art. One of his totems can be found in the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic atrium in Grand Marais.
The exhibit
The exhibit includes a wide variety of Morrison’s work, from paintings and drawings from the 1940s and abstract expressionist pieces from the 1950s and ’60s to “monumental” wood collages and sculptures of the 1960s and ’70s and “small, vibrant acrylics” and works on paper from the 1980s and ’90s, according to the Minnesota Museum of American Art website.
The exhibit at the Plains Art Museum will finish September 1 and proceed to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, and the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. It is the largest retrospective of Morrison’s work to date.
The exhibit was organized by the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, Arts Midwest in Minneapolis, and the Plains Art Museum in Fargo. In the exhibit are works loaned by Morrison’s son Briand Morrison of Grand Portage, ex-wife Hazel Belvo of Grand Marais, and Cook County Schools. The exhibit also includes a catalogue published by the University of Oklahoma Press and an interactive website that can be accessed at mmaa.org/pages/ModernSpirit .
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