George Morrison(1919–2000)
George Morrison (1919–2000), Ojibwe name Wah Wah Teh Go Nay Ga Bo ("Standing in the Northern Lights"), was a pioneering Native American modernist painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose work fuses European and New York Abstract Expressionism 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, Morrison insisted on modernism's universality: "I think of myself as an artist who happens to be Indian."
Educated at the Minneapolis School of Art (now MCAD) and later at the Art Students League in New York under George Grosz and Morris Kantor, Morrison came of age amid Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, exhibiting alongside the New York School in the 1940s and 1950s. His first solo show at Grand Central Moderns Gallery in 1948 coincided with Willem de Kooning's first New York solo. A Fulbright Fellowship took him to Paris and the south of France (1952); a John Hay Whitney Fellowship brought him back to Duluth.
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 celebrated 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, "the edge of the world" and the core structure of his art.
In 1970 Morrison 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. Retrospectives including "Standing in the Northern Lights" (1990) and "Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison" (2013–2015) have secured his place as a key figure in 20th-century American art and a foundational voice in Native Modernism.
In 2022, the United States Postal Service honored Morrison with a commemorative stamp series featuring five of his works. In 2025–2026, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents "The Magical City: George Morrison's New York," the artist's largest museum exhibition to date.
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