"My art is my religion. I've tried to unravel the fabric of my life and how it relates to my work. Certain Indian values are inherent--an inner connection with the people and all living things, a sense of being in tune with the natural phenomena, a consciousness of sea and sky, space and light, the enigma of the horizon the color of the wind."
-George Morrison in Jane Katz This Song Remembers: Self-Portraits of Native Americans in the Arts.
George Morrison
Structures Against the Sky, n.d.
Gouache and ink on paper
18 x 24 in.
Black and White Patterned Forms, 1952
Ink on paper
10 3/4 x 8 3/8 in.
Collection Minnesota Museum of Art
(a portion of) New England Landscape II, 1967
Wood collage
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
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| Spirit Path, New Day, Red Rock Variation: Lake Superior Landscape, 1990 acrylic and pastel on paper 22 1/2 x 30 1/8 in. Collection Minnesota Museum of Art |
Anishinaabe, an autonym, is the name by which a group refers to itself. Chippewa, Ojibwe and Odawa peoples fall under the Anishinaabe culture group and live in five primary geographic regions in the Northern United States and portions of Canada. As with many other connected native tribes, language is the common denominator. The Anishinaabe people speak various dialects that have roots in the Algonquin language family. Today the Anishinaabe are the second largest tribe in North America.
Other Anishinaabe Artists
David Bradley (1954-)
American Indian Gothic, 1983
Color lithograph on paper
30 1/8 x 22 1/4
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Chippewa, 1840
maker unknown
wood, deer hide, pigment
Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts
Anishinaabe House
1895-1910
birch bark, porcupine quill, dye
28 x 20 x 22 cm
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian
Agnes Bird
Chippewa Woman Stripping Birch Bark
n.d.
The current retrospective at the National Museum of the American Indian, New York, is on view through February 23, 2014. The exhibition is comprised of 80 works that include painting, drawing, print and sculpture. Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison is organized by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and Arts Midwest, with the Plains Art Museum.
On February 20th at 6:00 p.m. W. Jackson Rushing III, curator of Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison will be discussing the exhibition and the work of Morrison. I recently reached out to Dr. Rushing for information about his upcoming lecture, he kindly sent me an overview...
"Join us for an illustrated lecture that documents, celebrates, and investigates the artistic achievement of George Morrison, the distinguished and beloved Chippewa modernist (1919-2000) whose artwork is
held in numerous public and private collections. Morrison's journey from impoverished rural origin to international acclaim is a remarkable American story about regionalism, expatriation, urbanity, and homecoming, in which the significance of place is embedded in drawings, paintings, collages, prints, and sculptures.
Often inspired by land, water, and sky, Morrison mixed abstraction with representation to produce sensuous works of art that explore form, color, and texture. His award-winning wood collages and monumental totems were remarkable contributions to American modernism and have much to offer viewers in the 21st century."
-W. Jackson Rushing III
W. Jackson Rushing III is an Adkins Presidential Professor of Art History and Mary Lou Milner Carver Chair in Native American Art. He was educated at the University of Texas at Austin and served previously as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in Arts and Humanities at UT-Dallas. He works in several intersecting areas: Native American art; modern and contemporary art; Southwest modernism; theory, criticism, and methodology; museum studies; and post-colonialism and visual culture. His teaching and scholarship explore the interstitial zone between (Native) American studies, anthropology, and art history. For more than twenty years now he has pursued a duality—Native-inspired modernist primitivism and indigenous modernism in the United States and Canada.
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