George Morrison

American, 1919 - 2000

(not assigned)Grand Portage, Minnestoa, USA

BiographyBorn in northern Minnesota in the Grand Portage band of Chippewa (Ojibway) Indians, George Morrison made abstract paintings, wood collages, and sculptures that enlarged the notion of Native American art beyond the stereotypical Indian subject matter.

Morrison had a traditional Ojibway upbringing on the Grand Portage reservation before attending an Indian boarding school in Wisconsin. He studied art at the Minneapolis School of Art (today the Minneapolis College of Art and Design) and the Art Students League in New York. Living and working in New York in the 1950s and 60s, he participated in the prime of the Abstract Expressionist movement with richly colored abstract paintings and Surrealist drawings

Morrison taught art at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1960s. On returning to his home state in 1970, he taught in the studio art and Indian studies programs at the University of Minnesota until retirement in 1983. His late works included large relief sculptures, as wide as twenty feet, composed of found and prepared wooden elements collaged together. He also made a series of commissioned wooden column-like sculptures he called "Totems," and painted many small (one foot wide or less), thickly-painted abstractions known as the "Horizons" series. Morrison's art was featured in a debut exhibition (with Allan Houser) at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in 2004.

Written and submitted by Thomas O'Sullivan, museum curator and freelance writer.
From Grand Marais, Minnesota, George Morrison was an abstract-expressionist painter and sculptor, known for his wood collages and paintings inspired by Lake Superior. His focus was on texture: "I like the so-called magical surface of a painting, the marks the painter makes". (234-Herskovik)

HIs training was in traditional art but in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he became established as an Abstract Expressionist and "for year was better known outside Native American art circles than within". (375-Lester).

He was born on the Grand Portage Ojibwa Reservation in northern Minnesota and earned a scholarship to study commercial art in Minneapolis. He graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, went to New York City to the Art Students League, and then to Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship.

For 20 years he lived in New York and also taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, but returned to Minnesota in 1970. There he founded the Indian Studies Program at the University of Minnesota and was a professor of art until 1983. After that, he moved to the North Shore of Lake Superior until his death.

He became the first artist honored with the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art from the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana, and in 1992, the Tweed Museum at the University of Minnesota in Duluth and the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul gave him a retrospective exhibition. In 2003, a solo exhibition is planned at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian.

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