Palisade, 1958
Details
1958
Oil on canvas
41 × 55 in
Signed lower right
About George Morrison (1919-2000)
George Morrison (1919–2000) was a pioneering modernist painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose work fuses European and New York abstraction with an enduring attachment to the North Shore of Lake Superior. Born in Chippewa City near Grand Marais, Minnesota, and an enrolled member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, he liked to say he was “a painter who happened to be Indian,” insisting on modernism’s universality even as his art remained grounded in Native land and experience.
Educated at the Minneapolis School of Art and later at the Art Students League in New York, Morrison came of age amid surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, exhibiting alongside the New York School in the 1940s and 1950s. A Fulbright Fellowship took him to Paris and the south of France; a John Hay Whitney Fellowship brought him back to Duluth, where his vocabulary of biomorphic forms, dense surfaces, and fractured “land constructions” continued to evolve.
From the mid-1960s on, Morrison developed two signature bodies of work: monumental “wood collages,” assembled from weathered driftwood into stratified wall reliefs, and the long Horizon series of paintings and drawings. Both are anchored by the horizon line—a motif he traced to a lifetime of looking out over Lake Superior, where the meeting of water and sky became, in his words, “like the edge of the world” and the core structure of his art.
In 1970 he returned permanently to Minnesota to teach studio art and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, later building his home and studio “Red Rock” on the Grand Portage Reservation, a few yards from the lake. Retrospectives such as Standing in the Northern Lights and Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison have secured his place as a key figure in 20th-century American art and a foundational voice in Native modernism. His work is held in major collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and numerous other museums across the United States.
Educated at the Minneapolis School of Art and later at the Art Students League in New York, Morrison came of age amid surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, exhibiting alongside the New York School in the 1940s and 1950s. A Fulbright Fellowship took him to Paris and the south of France; a John Hay Whitney Fellowship brought him back to Duluth, where his vocabulary of biomorphic forms, dense surfaces, and fractured “land constructions” continued to evolve.
From the mid-1960s on, Morrison developed two signature bodies of work: monumental “wood collages,” assembled from weathered driftwood into stratified wall reliefs, and the long Horizon series of paintings and drawings. Both are anchored by the horizon line—a motif he traced to a lifetime of looking out over Lake Superior, where the meeting of water and sky became, in his words, “like the edge of the world” and the core structure of his art.
In 1970 he returned permanently to Minnesota to teach studio art and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, later building his home and studio “Red Rock” on the Grand Portage Reservation, a few yards from the lake. Retrospectives such as Standing in the Northern Lights and Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison have secured his place as a key figure in 20th-century American art and a foundational voice in Native modernism. His work is held in major collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and numerous other museums across the United States.