Essay: Smithsonian Institution

From:

Contemporary Visual Expressions

Anacostia Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1987

p.p. 35-41

 

Keith Morrison

By David C. Driskell

Keith Morrison has determined the significant role the ancestral arts of Africa hold for him. After studying principles of Western art, he quickly returned to Africa’s greatest wellspring of ideas, via both the transformed iconography of his native Jamaica and the adopted principles of African-American culture. His discerning eye absorbs and builds upon the immediate strengths of the ethnic theme, the myths and legends of his own childhood.

As artist and scholar, he can be closely linked with an important linage in Afro-American art, the tradition of Alain Locke and James a. Porter.

As critic and scholar, Morrison is the most articulate spokesman to come to the discipline in the last decade. His enlightened body of writing focuses on the heritable sensibilities of Black artists, without referring to their work as an appendage of white culture.

Morrison the artist stands tall among those who would claim their African ethnicity as beacons of light from which to draw the serious substance of art forms that make universal statements. Here we will focus on Morrison as artist and the sources that nourish his art – true, sources on which Sam Gilliam, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, and William T. Williams draw, but for Morrison with the added dimension of a Caribbean childhood.

Our attention turns first to the Jamaican Experience in which Morrison bathed physically and spiritually for his first seventeen years. He was born in 1942 near Kingston, in Linstead, a town noted for its beauty and favorable year-round climate. His was a middle-class rearing, the kind that prepares one for a mastery of traditional life accented by certain stylistic adaptations form polite European Culture. Jamaica’s capital city, Kingston, provided his and much more for the aspiring artist. Moreover, in this Caribbean society, Black people played significant roles in government, the arts, education, and life in general. Morrison completed courses at the [Jamaica Institute school of Art, then qualified to enroll] in the Art Institute of Chicago to pursue a [Bachelors then, later, a Master of Arts degree.

Morrison brought with him to Chicago the patterns and forms of West Indian imagery that he since has successfully woven through his art — both abstract and figurative – over the past thirty years. Initially, he had attempted to blend this imagery into a formal design concept that let abstraction develop without conflict in his work.

“ In very case the source of the patterns is with its emotional and sensual power,” Morrison stated in conversation with the author. “This to my mind is not unlike the effect of pattern in African and some Middle Eastern art. This use of pattern is also very much a part of folk art in Jamaica and other parts of South and Central America where got my first interest in it. Further, I have always liked the ‘funky’ quality of the patterns of the clothes and decoration of poor people in Jamaica.”

But his studies toward the masters of fine arts at the Art Institute of Chicago also provided impetus to investigate traditional Western sources and to absorb the genius of their artistry into his work. The work of Goya impressed him most, especially because the Spanish painter’s work vividly portrayed true elements of human drama.

“It is painting about the drama which results from human relationships,” Morrison further stated, “ ‘rather than the study of compositions or problems of form.” Goya sees the human drama as tragic, comic, and grotesque at the same time. His vision fascinates me. I do not wish to paint like Goya: after all, his world and mine are very different. However, I feel some spiritual compatibility with his work.”

Despite the intellectual stimulus of Chicago, as a graduate student Morrison felt the cultural shock and sense of isolation, which often encompasses foreign students in a new land. He missed Jamaica’s warmth and openness of society. Now for the first time in his life, he experienced overt racial prejudice, the kind Black Americans have lived with all their lives.

It struck him as odd that there were no Black teachers in the school, of art at the art Institute. He met very few Black artists. American textbooks he noted, especially art history books, mentioned Black Americans only in the context of slavery. He learned that Blacks were thought to have no historical or cultural roots other than those acquired in the United States.

After finishing graduate school Morrison began a process of re-education: unlearning a great deal of Western art history in order to learn about 19^th century Black artist such as Robert S. Duncanson, Edward M. Bannister, Edmonia Lewis and Henry O. Tanner, and then in the 20^th century, Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Augusta savage, Jacob Lawrence, and Elizabeth Catlett.

It did not take Morrison long to see the richness of Black culture and he quickly began to process and synthesize through his art the merger of cultures of the African/West Indian and European. As he began to merge these cultures into the format of his work, he also began to incorporate iconographically those metaphors and symbols that carried with them a universal message. He reasoned, in an American sense, that abstraction was the best way to pursue such goals. In his earlier works, realistic subjects emerged in medium to large canvases that dealt with the maximum use of space as a means of staging people and things on two-dimensional plane almost abstractly. Yet he observed something missing in his art,. Abstraction dominated the work spatially in patterns and design, yet the content Morrison yearned for seemed to lack the color and richness in the art of Jamaican culture. The result was the development of a body of work that did not press to make political statements or force his Blackness to be announced in text. Instead, this work expressed the profundity of the man: a Black artist whose sources were rich with myths and narrative accounts of New World culture that had been greatly informed by the ancient traditions of African life.

So what we see in the current body of Morrison’s work comes into existence through the artist’s introspective review of soul and culture. Most recently, Morrison has returned to the folklore, religion, and myths of his native Jamaica for thematic ideas to enrich and inform his canvases in the same manner that in Black literature Langston Hughes used the simple ways of Black people to highlight the drama he saw so richly played out ion Black American life. Such art, while rising from the basis of a fragmented cultural context because of the complexity of American society, particularly as concerns race, is quickly discernible not be in mainstream. But that is one of Morrison’s strengths. By not being mainstream, he has the approval of his culture to draw upon the ordinary. In so doing, he can laugh about conditions that would upset others; and he can celebrate that which reaches the common understanding of the untutored observer. Much of what appears complex and puzzling within this cultural matrix is indeed simplistic in its forthrightness in telling a story. It is here that we enjoy an Afrocentric sensibility in Morrison’s art.

His art is not only Afrocentric in its myth bearing, as in the way it explores individual space and cultural territory, but it is also Afrocentric in the way it explores the folk culture of urban and rural Jamaica. To a certain extent, his art stands alone on its cultural turf. (Robert Rauschenberg stood alone when he explored American urban culture through introduction of pop art idealizing junk and familiar image. For this he was awarded the accolade of a creative genius of his day.) I ask, is it not important that Black artists look about themselves for their own discoveries in order to make meaningful statements that underline the sources of their cultural turf?

The discoveries applied to cultural turf in music can be equally inviting as art: the mythic content that exists in the Blues is strictly Black in form, yet it is universal in its descriptive analysis of loneliness, suffering, hunger, love, and companionship. It is that which is ordinary and simplistic in format which makes it territorial in tonal quality. As original art forms, the Blues, spirituals, Gospel, Jazz, and Black Folk art stand alone in their rejection of mainstream formula and process, and are alone I their celebration of the ordinary. They are the most original forms of art to emerge in the United States and are Afrocentric rather than Eurocentric in their universality.

Morrison, like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, and then before them, Aaron Douglass and William H. Johnson, examined the richness of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American cultures, absorbed their strengths, and vowed not to allow his own art to become a footnote to white culture. He works within an established tradition that holds up the image of man to “the measure of things.” Such a world recognizes the kindred associations of animals and spirits as viable forms from which to remake an art of African vintage. The success of these works is evident in Morrison’s paintings in Contemporary Visual Expressions.

By returning to the genuine sources of art he grew up with in the West Indies, Morrison all but removes himself from the unsound didactic criticism that needlessly compares the work of a Black artist with that of an artist of European ancestry. It will not be easy to tie Morrison, tail end, to a Julian Schnabel or latter-day expressionists. He does not fit the mold. Morrison’s originality goes beyond formalism within Western formula. Indeed, he does observe the academism of Western painting by providing infinite spatial grounds through which the action of a given subject takes place. But with this visual device, he is able to tell a personal story without the psychological discomfort of abandoning the spirit he brings to painting. He continues to hold the viewer captive in his work by offering an unconstrained sense of freedom and the freshness we experience when looking at walking canes, ‘ grotesque jugs,’” and other carved images from within the Black folk art idiom.

We recognize Morrison’s attempt to recall the functional aspect of art by making paintings that are important to the humanizing process. His drawing from functional sources affirms selfhood and thereby strengthens the notion that his art particularizes the Black experience in a way which connects it positively to the nature and form of the African mind. Here he views the African mind in terms of its originality in the context of Africa and African peoples in the American diaspora. This vision of truth that the African mind has brought to the art of the Western world is refreshing and regenerative. Picasso, Modigliani and Brancusi were among the first to recognize it. The richness of art of the African diaspora derives from the experiences of blacks moving westward – hyping the creative context of art with the magic and emotion of Africa, thereby bridging the gap between African and European cultures. Morrison rallies nobly to this challenge, picking up the pieces along the way, and consistently creates a body of work that refers to the subjects other minority artists so often overlook in their quest to enter the mainstream of majority culture art.

Morrison’s use of the figure in composition shows his affinity with the paintings o f Goya. The figuration in his art is usually involved with life and death situations. The satire and humor of the good life are revealed in the uses of man, dolls, and members of the animal kingdom. His poetic treatment of the theme of life is poignant and enhanced by three recurring themes: the first is characterized by images that show satire and humor; the second concerns death; and the third deals with the masquerade or Jonkanu dancers in Jamaica in lifelike situations. Concerning his use of animals and dolls, the artist recently stated to the author, “I often use animals as a symbolic substitute for humans in paintings. I also use dolls the same way. Sometimes the animals are often dolls. As such they are like effigy figures. In addition, I feel they create a of unstable reality or of a reality whose meaning is ironic in its transcendence. I mean that the reality is a real fish at one moment and a toy fish in a bowl the next. It has the effect of being tragic at one moment and comic the next. It also creates the condition of reducing the awesome burdens of human misery to the trivia of dolls and toys — and vice versa.”

While life seems the central theme in many of Morrison’s canvases, death is often alluded to or acted out in the guise of familiar forms. Here death is the ultimate response man makes to living. The African mind, form post slavery days in the Caribbean and in the United States, as in Africa before the coming of the European, was [preoccupied with death. The death rites of Africans in Egypt four thousand years ago greatly influenced the twenty-five-year old burial rites of the Yoruba people of West Africa in what is present-day Nigeria. Many of these Yoruba descendants were settled in the New World under the forced migration of slavery. Through various religious and secular rites, slaves kept alive notions of how to prepare for “the good death,” be it through religion or service to mankind. While some of Morrison’s art comments on Black crime, much of it speaks to the good death. Often he recollects his experiences as a child, going with his grandmother to funerals, wakes and burial rites. He recalls how African in origin these events seemed, just as Martha Jackson-Jarvis’s art recalls her childhood visits to family gravesites in Virginia and the ritual offerings to the dead.

Morrison deals with the theme of death in two distinct ways. In the first, he comments upon the daily hunger and eventual death of thousands of African children while a mostly well-fed world looks on. Death resounds in in its ability to rob one of the good life. The artist evokes the social responsibility of all people to help prevent starvation – wherever it occurs. In the second theme, Morrison comments upon death as being the end of the myth. In this case, death is seen as palatable, humorous, and inevitable.

Bones of Africa, for example, is filled with mauve and somber colors in a very abstract way. The desert, as in Echo of a Scream, is the somber setting of this chilling theme. In Bones of Africa, death in the form of a skeleton is served up in the grand style of the best of fine hotels; silver, mat and plate lying in two-point perspective are over the thin shadow of the continent of Africa underneath. The bones are the skeletal remains that result from physical death, but they are also the “dry bones” of Biblical literature already connected and waiting to “ … hear the Word of the Lord” at the appointed day of Resurrection. The mythic content of death – the subject of relief, and death the “grim reaper” who goes around taking lives – is woven into and out of the composition in a manner that presents two realities of what dying is about. Shadow Over Africa presents two Ibeji figures, Yoruba twin statues, carved to enhance the life of death of twins, on a tablemat. The male Ibeji is standing, a position indicating that this twin is alive, the other lies over an empty plate., a symbol of death. A snake curls its body in and around the picture, while all exists within the shadow of a condor, the death bird.

Not all of Morrison’s paintings are as explicit as Bones and Shadow Over Africa in their attempt to portray the mythic presence of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American subjects in American Art. Some are based on the individual aspirations of the artist to put bits and pieces of his own heritage in place without systematizing iconography of Christian art.

In A Wreath for Udomo, death as the end of the myth is observed. This work by Morrison refers to the fatal price many African leaders pay so that their countries may be free of Western colonization and domination. A lone trumpeter, with hors and phallus erect, a portrayal of man’s distinctly visceral quality, send forth the potent requiem – the death tune – the last call of a stylishly dressed dead tuxedoed leader who is seen abstractly floating above the ground. His ancient spirit lies below, recounting the live s and death of Black leaders in the Western world from Toussaint L’Overture from a Haiti to Patrice Lumumba in post-colonial Zaire. The floating body symbolizes the notion that death frees the soul. The mummy underneath is the ancient symbol of death from Egypt and the Lazarus of the New Testament. A circle of Christian crosses enumerates the many deaths Blacks gave to cause of freedom. A cock crows in the distant space adjacent to an unclaimed halo. The denial of Christ is made real here with the symbolic denial of the Black man’s humanity and freedom. The horse and bull figure boldly in Morrison’s iconography. Unlike Picasso’s bull in Guernica, which represents brute force and power, the bull in A Wreath for Udomo is rather tame and provides an aspect of comic relief in the shadow of a docile horse who seems not to know front from rear. One split banana leaf, a bright reminder that all of this action is taking place in the tropics, overlaps a rinceau in the form of a wreath made of purple passion flowers. A Rastafarian priest orchestrates the entire ceremony in the form of a dream.

Again, the concept of the dual levels of reality manifests itself in Morrison’s art in a manner similar to in the way it appears in the art of Jacob Lawrence. When asked about this analogy, Morrison responded by saying, “a strong part of the tradition of my painting came from Jacob Lawrence. This is especially true in the more abstract works such as A Wreath for Udomo and The Ritual of Death is a Black-tie Affair, where the space tends to be more ambiguous or the forms more flat. However, it is also generally true in terms of the use of contrasting color to create special effects and prismatic views. These ideas in my work did not originate upon seeing Jacob Lawrence’s paintings. They came from seeing the forms of the Jonkanu dancers in Jamaica as a child. However, Lawrence’s paintings reinforced and clarified the possibility of using these forms in painting. In this vein, my work also relate to that of Romare Bearden and David Driskell.”

The Ritual of Death is a Black-tie Affair again plays upon humor and satire in a complex setting where on the ninth night of celebration of the death of a loved one all night strange personages sing and dance. Here, ghostly forms appear as a two-headed horse, an androgynous person, a serpent, and an undressed corpse in formal attire. The reference is strictly Jamaican in its homage to ghosts (duppies) and its cautious reverence for travel in and out of cemeteries. The death rite in Jamaica parallels, in many ways, the celebration among Southern Blacks at wakes, watches, or vigils for the dead. But one should not confuse the benign spirit of a duppy with the evil which resulted in violent death as in Ton Ton Macoute. Dominating this composition is a pair of dark glasses – the kind worn by the secret police of François “papa Doc” Duvalier’s violent Haitian regime –like the scorpion symbolizing death of thousands of Haitians. The dark glasses are blind to justice and hide the real appearance of the criminal. The butterfly symbolizes freedom and peace in the midst of violence.

Life, the central theme of so many of Morrison’s canvases, is depicted with much humor and satire. But his humor is often universalized, as it relates to a particular theme, a legend, or folktale. In River Jordan, a fearless Black preacher stands at the helm of his boat, decked in colorful regalia befitting an African chief or prophet David of the Spiritualist Church of Wandering Souls. He is commanding souls forward within the gaping mouth of a big paper fish. The imagery revives the Christian theme of Jonah and the Whale, but it comments satirically upon those who blindly follow leadership representative of a false doctrine. The monster fish is colorful but unreal.

Its teeth threatened, although its mouth is securely locked except for a piece held open by the curve of the boat in the upper regions of the fish’s jaws. Again, the artist reverted to childhood memories of monster tales sprinkled with the flavor of Christian stories for moral reasons. Inside the jaws of the paper fish a skeleton figure dances as in flight. He is the freest of all on the make-believe journey. The River Jordan symbolizes crossing over waters in life that give setting to a place, in this case, a body of water, in Black religious lore, that lies just beyond life and into death, that must be navigated successfully if one wishes to reach Heaven. The Negro spiritual intones,

…Jordan River, I’m bound to cross,

Oh! Oh! Jordan river, I’m bound to cross,

One more wide river to cross …

Satire and humor dominate Echo of a Scream. Here the point of reference is again two fish that are equally unreal. Both open wide their mouths to accent their ferocious character. But we are not convinced that they are dangerous. They too represent phases in one’s life. Here the fish are out of character, geographically, with their natural environment: they are dessert fish. They are the kind that live without water. They remind us of the fish tales or the phallic stories that Lawrence Levine connects with certain elements of Black lore in his book Black Culture, Black Consciousness. These works exploit the humor present in the idiomatic expression used by Southern Blacks who do not wish to give a straight answer to a question: “seems like it was but it wasn’t.” In fact, these works likewise uphold an old African notion that there is never altogether one reality with form.

The satire and humor of a work such as Echo of a Scream also shows that the African mind is inventive in “making do” with what “comes up against.” The concept of satire, the ability to “laugh to keep from crying,” is broad in its philosophical implications. And through its convincing form, be it the visual imagery of Morrison, the tonal quality of a Blues song, or Black rhythmic rap to an urban strut, the message often accentuates what is real about a given thing in more than one way, while it remarks upon the humor therein.

Morrison’s feeling for myth and ritual as expressed in his art presents itself in several ways. It is fundamentalist in its emotional outpouring of religious and mythical quality. It is likewise extremely Jamaican in the way it reveals the several layers of reality within the image format. The layers of reality in the African and Afro-Caribbean lore, religious and symbolism, as well as the magical content in the ten paintings that Morrison has contributed to Contemporary Visual Expressions are revelations of the African mind at its best in the New world. Morrison is at his best when completely striking the magical note that lets him draw upon his own Black sources.

About the author:

David C. Driskell was awarded the Presidential Medal of HonorHe is the author of many books, including Two Centuries of Afro-American art, Hidden Heritage, and Contemporary Visual Expressions. He is Professor emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park.