George Morrison (1919-2000) was a Native American, Chippewa artist who grew up along the shores of Lake Superior in Chippewa City, Minnesota. Though he spent almost 3 decades in New York, he called Minnesota home and returned to it in 1970 where he was admired by regionalists for defying stereotypes through the integration of Native American heritage and modern art.
He grew up surrounded by Native American practices and the Great Lake Superior. During his childhood, he and his siblings often endured the frigid temperatures of the lake to swim in it for fun. He played with many Native American children, but recalled feeling a lot of prejudice from others. Perhaps this, or his innate love of art, lead to his preference of being alone and he regularly withdrew from others to draw and copy things out of books. He would also search for perfect wood pieces to carve into or arrange to make objects. All of these childhood experiences would later influence his art.
After graduating high school in Chippewa City, he studied at the Minneapolis Institute of Art where he encountered the European traditions of Cubism, Expressionism and Impressionism. He and other students began to separate themselves from academic painting and started to gravitate towards the avant garde in New York. He moved from Minnesota and studied at the Art Students League of New York. He spent almost 30 years painting among well known artists who practiced Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism and abstraction and felt free to experiment with modernism. Morrison was featured around the country at exhibitions like the Whitney’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting and was admired in Minneapolis in the First Biennial Exhibition at the Walker Art Center.
He eventually married and he and his family spent summers at Cape Cod in Provincetown. They often walked along the beach, collecting drift wood that Morrison imagined to have floated in from all over the world, each one showing a different past through its chipping paint or rusty nails. With his love for creating with this material, he began to move into wood collages.
Morrison felt a need to return to his roots and gave up his position at the Rhode Island School of Design. He applied to the University of Minnesota, where he taught American Indian studies as well as studio arts. In Minnesota, his work was admired by a new regional audience as he integrated his Native American heritage with his refined practices of modern art. He continued to work with wood collages made from found wood from Lake Superior, which became increasingly popular in the Twin Cities. He collaged the wood into interlocking compositions that were hung on walls, decorated the exteriors of buildings such as the Minneapolis American Indian Center, and used in furniture and as seen in Wooden Collage Table (Figure 1). Like with this table, he often told people who bought his collages to put them under glass to protect them. He spoke of finding a landscape in all of his collages, though each has a different mood. Some are rugged and left to look aged while other are refined, sanded and stained. The pieces housed at Hiro Fine Art fall into the later category with smooth contours and deliberate edges.
His wood work does not embody the stereotypical aesthetics of Native American work, and there have been many debates surrounding his ethnicity; is he a Native artist or and artist who happens to be of Native descent? In the early years of his career, Morrison was seen as too extreme to be considered a Native artist, but later there was a shift. He became known for his work holding a sense of spirituality and embraced his heritage. He found connections to it by using abstract forms to communicate Native American values. Wooden Circle speaks of the value of community (Figure 2). Made of small pieces that show respect for individuality, they connect together to create wholeness and unity. He was inspired by other Native American cultures of the Southwest and often created totems. The fusion of Native tradition and modern practices influenced by Constructivism and Minimalism created pieces with unconventional, but noteworthy, aesthetics. Though most are monumental in scale, Wooden Totem embodies these unique practices in a sculptural scale. (Figure 3).
Inspired by the grain of wood, Morrison created many lithographs and drawings. Referring to ribbons of grain, he created skies, horizons, grounds and water in many works such as #12 City Scape with Chrysler Building (1980) (Figure 4). His geometric abstractions valued precision in to create deliberate curves and straight edges to evoke a cubist feel as in Untitled (1986) (Figure 5). The lithograph, Ice Jam (1986), plays off of cubism and surrealism with its illusion of infinite expansion and texture (Figure 4).
Morrison was also well known for his paintings of landscapes, cityscapes and still lifes as well as pieces that were pure abstraction. In the last few decades of his life, Morrison traveled between the Twin Cities and the North Coast where he painted Lake Superior with vivid colors and unexpected textures that create an abstracted landscape. His failing health lead him to stay settled in the Northern part of Minnesota until his death in 2000 where he continued to create smaller pieces and drawings as well as be an active member of the American Indian Movement.
Figure 1: Wooden Collage Table
Figure 2: Wooden Circle
Figure 3: Wooden Totem
Figure 4: #12 City Scape with Chrysler Building (1980)
Figure 5: Untitled (1980)
Figure 6: Ice Jam (1986)
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