by KeithMorrison | Sep 24, 2015 | Bibliography
Franklin W Knight
The Art of Keith Morrison
Jamaica Observer
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
“Caribbean
oil on canvas
2010
This year between September 7 and December 11 the Mechanical Hall Gallery of the University of Delaware features a superb solo exhibition of selected works of the internationally acclaimed Jamaican prize-winning artist, Keith Morrison. The exhibition is called simply, “Keith Morrison: Middle Passage” and covers three spacious rooms. Morrison has many paintings titled Middle Passage. Only two on display along with another called Atlantic are directly related to the notorious transatlantic migration of enslaved Africans. The two are dark and depressingly sad.
But this exhibition is really not about Africa or the transatlantic slave trade. Instead, the selection represents a delightful panorama of superb oil paintings and large watercolours done by the artist over the past decade that powerfully illustrates his elastic versatility and exquisite use of colour and form in a seductively engaging visual narrative that forms the essence of Morrison’s artistic style. Morrison’s paintings are more than mere works of visual art. They are observations drawn from literature, history and geography as well as evocative memories intricately woven into complex presentations that stimulate the mind while feeding the eyes.
Keith Morrison explaining his art. (Photo: Franklin W Knight)
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Morrison is not your conventional commercial artist. He is also a highly accomplished curator, art critic, educator and lecturer. Born in Linstead and educated at Calabar High School, Morrison studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he distinguished himself gaining both Bachelors and Master of Fine Art degrees. Over almost half a century he has produced close to 1,000 paintings, sometimes working on as many as six different subjects at the same time. Like Mozart, he visualises the completed work and works tenaciously until the canvas approximates the mental image.
These works are distinguished enough to be found in some of the most well-known public collections around the world: the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Jamaica National Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Museum of Modern Art of Monterrey, Mexico.
Yet it would be a great mistake to think that all Morrison does is paint. He has a very full and active life teaching, travelling and commenting about art on radio and television. His discussions have also appeared in numerous journals, books, catalogues and museum publications.
Morrison has held senior professorships and administrative positions at some of the finest universities across the United States. These include Fisk University, DePaul University, the University of Chicago Illinois Circle, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University, and the Tyler School of Art of Temple University. As dean at Maryland, San Francisco and Tyler, he was involved in major curricular and administrative innovations.
Morrison has held solo and group exhibitions in scores of galleries around the world. He represented Jamaica at the Caribbean Arts Biennale in 1994 and the Venice Arts Biennale in 2001. He was a representative for the United States at the Shanghai Biennale in 2008.
In an insightful essay in the Delaware exhibition catalogue, curator Julie McGee expertly captures the essence of Morrison’s work. She writes: “Engaging personal, local, and global concerns, Morrison’s visual language includes a vernacular vocabulary that is quintessentially diasporic, if not nomadic. His pictorial and iconographic clues connect but do not bind his work to a black or Caribbean diaspora. Responsive to past and present histories, influenced by music, literature, and his physical environs, Morrison describes his process as “more intuitive than intellectualised”. And so it is.
Apart from his skilful use of colour, what sets Morrison’s art apart is the consummate skill with which he manages to conflate religious and secular, real and imaginary, or the triumphant and the trivial. Several genres of art flow seamlessly through his work, although it is possible to trace some evolution from his more abstract early art in the 1970s to a complex figurative contemporary design that his biographer, Renée Ater, calls “a painterly storyteller”.
Much of his Jamaican childhood and his later global wanderings permeate his art. The exposition in Delaware has a lovely panoramic view highly reminiscent of Port Antonio harbour and Navy Island. It also has a market presentation that could be a Linstead market scene. Morrison admits that the port scene is a stylised memory of his first visit by train to Port Antonio at the age of nine which he then thought to be the most beautiful view he had ever seen. Many years later he painted the scene from memory.
There is also a delightfully intricate watercolour composition called African Tango, and an extremely interesting bullfighting painting. This representation is quite unlike the famous painting of Manet with its large cast of characters around a stricken bull in the bullring. In Morrison’s painting the bull is the overwhelming central feature. From afar, the composition seems to be a simple but dramatic bullfight poster. Closer, however, the picture overflows with symbolism. The bull is attacking a bloody cape and only the hands of the matador are apparent. The three-coloured, barbed banderillas oddly placed in the oversized back of the bull are really crosses bearing individuals, presumably a scene of the crucifixion of Christ.
Although much of Morrison’s art is autobiographical, it includes astute political commentary and reflections on his travels, his observations, his reading and musical tastes. One of his paintings is called Wide Sargasso Sea. Religion, magic, rituals, celebrations of life and premonitions of death abound along with water – in bayous, in rivers, or the sea. People, plants and animals commingle in ironic and comedic situations. There are so many levels of understanding that the art becomes a sort of X-ray of the artist’s impressively vast erudition. Nevertheless, Morrison’s art, unlike the writings of someone like Jorge Luis Borges, never intimidate intellectually. Rather, his art is gently accessible to the eyes with abundant food for thought. This extraordinary artist and his exceptional professional career constitute a truly Jamaican jewel.
Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/The-art-of-Keith-Morrison_9882909#ixzz1n94HzhJW
by KeithMorrison | Sep 24, 2015 | Bibliography
“A Wreath for Udomo”
oil on canvas
1986
Charles Merewether: “Transformation and Renewal”
Myth and Magic in America: The Eighties
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, 1991
ISBN-968-6623-00-0
“Transformation and Renewal”
By Charles Merewether
Pp. 125-126
Drawing on his Jamaican culture, the African-American artist Keith Morrison also explores the savage exchange between civilization and primitivism. Morrison writes:
I am fascinated with the idea that the achievement of high civilization is often accompanied by the achievement of high primitivism. Ritual ceremonies, cultivated to symbolize our highest values, often reveal savagery. High mass, in which we eat His flesh and blood, is a symbolic form of cannibalism. Some of the highest rites of Ancient Africa and meso-America involved human sacrifice. The equation of civilization and barbarism as part of the same whole is a recurrent theme in my work.
Death recurs throughout his paintings in a way in a way of both pointing to the presence and power it exercises’ over African and African-American cultures. It s both the continuity and end of myth. In Bones of Africa, 1986, [p. 173], a skeleton, presumably of a black person, is served up on a plate with knife and fork. In A Wreath for Udomo, 1986 [p.172], African leaders die in the face of their struggle for liberation from Western colonialism and domination. Elsewhere he pictures the everyday culture of black people with its rituals of baptists and spirituals, its beliefs surrounding dolls and animals, and customs over the dead and living.[1]
With ironic humor, he creates a sense of a society in conflict, reduced to an unstable transient reality. The Ritual of Death is a Black Tie Affair, 1986 [p.174], pays homage to the benign spirits or ghosts (duppies) who in Jamaica appear on the ninth day after the death of someone. Morrison represents them as ghostly forms who appear dancing and singing alongside two-headed horses, androgynous persons, serpents and a corpse in formal attire. But such paintings seek to undo folklore as a quaint pastime off black people caught up in outmoded customs and traditions that have no bearing on the real world. What Morrison shows is an awareness of the perverse construction of primitivism, perverse because it indulges in brutality and destruction under the guise of civilization. This perversity allows him to laugh, to reveal the cruel absurdity, while at the same time, to recover a sense of the power of death over the living.
As with Basquiat, the work is neither modernist primitivism
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[1] David Driskell, ‘Keith Morrison’ Contemporary Visual Expressions, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987, p.40
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by KeithMorrison | Sep 24, 2015 | Bibliography
“Elektra”
oil on canvas
1986
Peter Schjeldahl: “The Time of the Meteor: U.S. Painting in the 1980’s”
From the catalogue:
Myth and Magic in America: The Eighties
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey (MARCO), 1991
ISBN-968-6623-00-0
[An exhibition and catalogue from MARCO of Painting in the Americas from Canada to Chile]
Excerpt from:
“The Time of the Meteor: U.S. Painting in the 1980’s”
By Peter Schjeldahl
Pp. 168-169
The burning out of the meteor of the 80’s, as regards painting has left a strangely mixed feeling of loss and gain, a sort of collapse into richness – as at sunset when darkness reveals a sky full of stars. “The triumph of American painting” is over. Its dream of the past, embodied in a centralized Western mainstream tradition, and its dream of the future, figured in an always impending integral U.S. high culture, have disintegrated. The shattered bits of these dreams – many traditions, many cultural identities – are now dreaming in their own right. This show’s selection of on-European-American painters – Carlos Almaraz, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Gronk, Hung Liu, Keith Morrison, Lari Pittman, Juan Sanchez, and Jaune-Quick-to-See Smith – displays some of the impulses that have come to prominence since the end of the 80’s. What they have in common is precisely a consciousness of fragmentation, envisioning a new past and a new future modeled not on some yearned-for Eden or Utopia but on the present fact of a multitudinous society. Aesthetically, these artists may seem conservative, reacting against modernist ideas of permanent formal and stylistic revolution in art. Nor are they “non-Western” in form and style. They seem comfortable with the old double virtue of Western painting: its capacity to symbolize individual consciousness while representing collective meanings. All of them use elements from the repertoires of (mostly expressionist and surrealist) modern art. But the attitude of these toward their influences is radical in its favoring of local content over global form as the fulcrum of meaning. They revolt against the notion of a centrally defined universal culture. Their new ideas entails energy in tune with authentic particularities of race, nation, sex, and class.
Azaceta, a Cuban expatriate in New York since 1960, is a legitimate hero of the multicultural movement, as one who persevered in the shadows of the U.S. art world with work that bore lonely witness to the ordeal of life forever exiled from a former culture and never truly arriving in a new one. He has long made art whose quality earned him a career, but whose content was largely ignored as the sort of vestige of ethnicity that the myth of the U.S. melting pot naively expects to disappear. In contrast to Azaceta’s isolated struggle for his identity it is the conviviality of the younger Nuyorican Juan Sanchez, whose idiosyncratic mix of painting and collage connects in innumerable ways with the ties that bind together an unmeltable community. The Mexican-American Almaraz, the Chicano Gronk, and the Native American Jaune-Quick-to-See smith practice lyrical painterly styles with firm traditions, and even fashions, in U.S. paintings of the last three decades. Their ability to revitalize these styles with fresh content from their cultural backgrounds supports the argument that their ethnicity is no mere spice to present paintings, but a condition of its further life
Lari Pittman, Keith Morrison and Hung Liu relate more directly to the character of dominant New York and European art of the 80’s. They differently address the condition of practically universal exile that has gone by the appropriately confusing term “postmodern” – that is, modern by other means. Pittman is Columbian-American, Morrison is Jamaican-American, and Liu is Chinese-American, and their overt imagery calls attention to their heritages perhaps even more insistently than that of the artists already named. But each uses the fictive space of painting or painting-construction not so much to communicate content as to thrust it into a zone of depersonalized subjectivity: decorative and ecstatic for Pitman, haunted and hilarious for Morrison, and semaphoric and ironic for Liu. Do these artists point to the possibility of a revived U.S. painting tradition which, having paused to assimilate the historic fact of multiculturalism, will flow onward in a new mainstream? Confronting the delirious and yet disciplined explosions of Pittman’s art, I sense an obscure and subterranean recirculation of imperatives – synthesis of the literal and the abstract, say, and of public and private mind – that drove Jackson Pollock long ago. The present phase of U.S. painting is clearly transitional, in any case. The authority of painting rests on a delicate and intricate web of social agreements that in the U.S. now is chaotic. But I suspect that the chaos will prove to have been fecund, and that by the end of the 90’s the old craft of painted pictures will have helped tell a new story of the nation.
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Peter Schjeldahl, poet, critic and educator, has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic.
by KeithMorrison | Sep 23, 2015 | Bibliography
“Spirituals”
oil on canvas
1986
Keith Morrison: Interpreter of the Mythic Dream
By David C. Driskell
Catalogue essay, for the exhibition ”Keith Morrison,”
Alternative Museum, New York City, March 10-April 28, 1990
It has been said that the true artist often defies the age-od adage that “ … one cannot go home again.” Home, in the literal sense of its natural properties as well as the dream, of it from the years of one’s youth, can be essential to the growth of the visionary artist. A native of Linstead, Jamaica, Keith Morrison is an artist of consummate vision. His art often takes him home – and indeed the viewer goes home with him – to the Caribbean and sometimes all the way back in time to Africa through a well planned painterly process. Morrison’s artistic journey is ours to enjoy in that as viewers we are allowed to witness the magic of the African diaspora.
Differences between the subject matter and the formal elements of his work are very significant. The forms in his work contain the richness of music and its structural principles, in a similar manner that Wassily Kandinsky used music to reinforce the structure of his non-objective paintings. His work also shows influence of the silhouette figural inventions of Jacob Lawrence. However, the formal qualities of Morrison’s work reveal his originality: he engages in willful play with the picture plane, with space which is real and which is not, with a characteristic use of shadow, line and mass, all juxtaposed against geometric configurations. In sum, the formal structure of his work shows the logic of a highly sophisticated painter.
His subject matter centers in Africa and the Caribbean. His interpretations of phenomena in those areas of the world is potently explored through his use of memory to recount stories about village life and religious practice. There is in his work a re-creation of legend and myth which has been transformed from oral to visual presentation. These works re-construct childhood memories of religious practices, Christian dogma and local lore. For example, a work such as “Baptism” recalls the richness of the special relationship of religion with an admixture of African ceremony and Christian ritual. Morrison’s interpretation of this sacramental act in Christianity is ladened with sexual overtones. In “Spirituals” the artist depicts a voluptuous, sprawling woman in sexual frenzy over the surface of an open Bible that is placed on a collection plate. Seen at the edge of the page are African effigy and ceremonial figures which remind us of the relationship between African religions and European Christianity.
Morrison has said that Francisco Goya’s art has inspired much of his work. This affinity with Goya may be seen in Morrison’s use of satire and the macabre. In his work, themes of death and comedy often combine to form cultural metaphors. In the paintings, the artist sometimes seems to cry while at other times to laugh at his past experiences.
While figural representation o sab essential element in Morrison’s painting, he avoids realism. While there are surrealistic tendencies in his work, its sense of primordial fantasy is independent of the more specific domain of the movement. As wit surrealism, his are fantasies of the psyche; but beyond surrealism, his work is based on age-old myths and spiritual visions which are actually practiced in the cultures in which his art is centered. He relies on the strength of a given image to inform and he convincingly achieves a most extraordinary painterly objective. As a result, he has made a number of actively reflective images which encompass aspects of the mythic dream mixed with certain elements of common history. In such carefully articulated pictorial arrangements as his, a new language of signs and symbols is given: one which is a well-planned part of the tempered vision of a seasoned painter who excels in interpreting the mythic dream.
Dr. David C. Driskell was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor. He 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.
