Keith Morrison
By Roberta Smith
One block north at the Alternative Museum (17 White Street, through tomorrow), the big, colorful figurative canvases of Keith Morrison hold up the walls. This is the first solo show exhibition in New York City for the artist, who was born in Jamaica in 1942, was educated in the Art Institute of Chicago and is chairman of the art department of the University of Maryland.
Mr. Morrison’s extreme and acerbic figurative style seems to owe something to the art of Robert Colescott. But his best images – among them “Elektra,” “Baptism of Sister Ruth, “The Ritual of Death is a Black-Tie Affair” and “Spirituals” – have an elastic, boomeranging energy of both form and subject that is distinct and that moves them in several spacial directions and through several cultures at once with unusual verve.”
New York Times, April 27, 1990, page 000022, National Edition, Review/Art; The Galleries of TriBeCa and What’s in Them.