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George Morrison: Anishinaabe Expressionist Artist

Author(s): Gerald Vizenor

Source: American Indian Quarterly , Summer - Autumn, 2006, Vol. 30, No. 3/4, Special Issue: Decolonizing Archaeology (Summer - Autumn, 2006), pp. 646-660

Published by: University of Nebraska Press

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George Morrison Anishinaabe Expressionist Artist

GERALD VIZENOR

George Morrison was an eminent expressionist painter with a singular

romantic vision and an erudite sense of natural reason and liberty. He created an elusive shimmer of "endless space," the color and eternal mo-

tion of nature. The horizons he painted were inspired by nature and lightened by his watch and visual memories of Lake Superior near the

Grand Portage Reservation in Minnesota.

The artistic creations of George Morrison and Allan Houser were pre-

sented in the recent inaugural exhibition of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). "Morrison and Houser be-

longed to a small disparate group of Native American artists," noted Truman Lowe in Native Modernism, "who ushered in a new, modernist

era in Native art history, in which identification with a uniform Indian

aesthetic gave way to greater freedom for personal experimentation and

expression."' Morrison was an artist of modern Native liberty.

Native American Indian artists clearly demonstrated the sentiments of

romanticism and modernism many generations before occidental domi-

nance, but the name and notion of personal, emotive creative practices

that departed from selected traditions have been embraced only recently.

Native artists were expressionists and modernists by continental barter,

tricky conversions, innovations, transformation, natural reason, sur-

vivance, and by nature; these modernist Native visions and mien were

brushed aside as simulations of Native "traditions" were constructed by

social scientists, museum curators, institutions, and agencies of the fed-

eral government.

Modernism and the sentiments of chance, personal visions, and imagic

transformations in art were Native practices and much more widespread

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than the elite wend of occidental entitlements would sanction in the dis-

covery of Native art, production, and commerce.

George Morrison was a Native modernist painter, and his inspiration

was both innate, Native by sentiments of natural reason and memory,

and learned by art history, museums, and galleries. He was roused more

by the imagic traces of nature, motion, color, and abstract patterns than

he was by the academies of modernist turns, modes, and representations. Morrison, in other words, was a Native romanticist and modernist and

an eminent expressionist painter by any cultural measure.

HORIZON LINES

Morrison told Margot Fontunato Galt in Turning the Feather Around

that the "basis of all art is nature." The North Shore of Lake Superior

"was subconsciously in my psyche, prompting some of my images."2

Morrison was nurtured in the presence of indigenous sounds and light

created by the seasons of the lake. He conceived of these images in the

abstract rush of colors and memory, not by naturalism or the mere aca-

demic representations of the natural world. Clearly he perceived that na-

ture was never silence but rather a brace of colors and the constancy of sound, a natural music.

Anishinaabe lexicons have no specific name or word for romanticism,

no traditional condition, distinction, mode, or practice that separates natural reason from creation. Natives practiced a natural art that antici-

pated the party of romanticism and modernism by emotive, personal,

creative expressions in stories, images, and objects of wood, bone, hide,

bark, and stone. Reason was inspired by nature, and Native artists cre-

ated stories and images of singular visions, a distinctive and eccentric individuality.

Anishinaabe woodland artists were aesthetic by natural reason- emotive romanticists, expressionists, and surrealists in a time of conti-

nental liberty. Surely Natives perceived artistic expression as more than mere resistance to realism, naturalism, and other occidental varieties of

artistic production and historical movements. The Anishinaabe word mazinaadin, an animate, transitive verb, means

to "make an image," and the word aakwendam, an animate, intransitive

verb, means "feelings" and "intense desires" in translation. These two words provide a sense of the emotive creation of an image and imply

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the artistic conditions of romanticism but not the movement or reac-

tion to tradition or neoclassicism. Other words related to mazinaadin, a

transitive image or imagic motion, are names of new experiences. The word mazinaatese, for instance, means "movie," and mazinaakide means

"pictured" or "photographed." Similarly, the emotive word aakwaadiz

means "fierce" in the language of the Anishinaabe.

Morrison was inspired by expressionism, an art movement already

underway at the time of his birth, September 30, 1919, in Chippewa City,

Minnesota, a Native village located near the Grand Portage Reservation. He was born at home, a descendant of the Raven totem of the Anishi-

naabe, otherwise known as the people named the Chippewa.3 His sur- name marks a curious union of Natives and voyageurs, the fur trade, and cultural transcendence.

Morrison was carried as an infant in a dikinaagan, a cradleboard, crafted in the traditional way by his father. "I was wrapped in buckskin

of cloth decorated with beadwork by my mother," he wrote in This Song

Remembers. "There were twelve children in our family, crowded into a

small frame house without electricity or plumbing. We were often hun-

gry and sick."4

Morrison learned the words and stories of primary colors in two lan-

guages, one oral and the second written, both sources of envisioned tone,

concentration, and emotive, romantic artistry. The word inaazo, an ani-

mate verb that means in translation "colored a certain way," traces the

Native sensibilities of his expressionist art. The word misko, "red," for in-

stance, is a preverb of visual memory, as in miskomin, "raspberry"; misk- waawaak, "red cedar"; miskwi, "blood"; and miskwazhe, "to have mea-

sles." Morrison likely observed the tricky tone of ozhaawashko, a word

that means blue and green, the transcendence of a bruise; ozhaawashko

aniibiish, "green tea"; and ozhaawashko bineshiinh, "bluebird." The pre-

verb ozaawi signifies the color brown and yellow, as in ozaawikosimaan,

"pumpkin"; ozaawindibe, to "be blond" or "have brown hair"; and ozaawi bimide, "butter."5

"I believe in going back to the magic of the earth and the lake, the sky

and the universe." Morrison did just that by natural reason, memory,

and creative images in two languages. "That kind of magic. I believe in

that kind of religion," he declared. "A religion of the rocks, the lake, the

water, the sky. Yes, that's what I believe in."6

Morrison was given two sacred names, Turning the Feather Around

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and Standing in the Northern Lights, at a healing ceremony. These names

inspired, and created a sense of presence and natural reason. "Walter

Caribou did a healing ceremony for me. I was very ill, and living here at

Grand Portage facing the lake," said Morrison. Caribou "dreamed two names-one dream, two names. Maybe I was on my way to recovery. Maybe what he did helped to make me well. You never know."7

Morrison survived several serious medical conditions, and then in

his sixties he was diagnosed with a rare disease of the lymphatic sys- tem. He matured with a physical disability, in dire poverty, and at an

insurmountable cultural distance, one might surmise, from the princely

salons of modern art that once shunned and later celebrated the subjec-

tive tease and prompts of abstract expressionism. Morrison, however,

would stay the visionary practices of Native artistry, probably unaware

of that singular association at the time, with his own creations in wood

and waves of brilliant, layered pigment.

The Anishinaabe painted and incised subjective, surreal pictures on wood and stone. Many centuries later similar images were renewed on spiritual scrolls, beaded patterns on clothes, cradleboards, ceremonial

objects, and in contemporary art. Surely the ancient pictures are atavistic,

emotive expressions, the intuitive course of nature on a mythic horizon. Morrison, in an interview, endorsed the "influence of surrealism" in

his horizon pictures. "There is no evidence of sentiment" and "no lit-

eral translation of people, sky or water." He pointed out that the "land-

scapes, by definition, are the horizon lines," and the bright, thick colors

are "more surreal than literal or realistic."8 Morrison circumvented academicism, or traditional, artistic formu-

laries at the Minneapolis School of Art. He was never a "slick" painter,

and his surreal, artistic expressions served no social cues or cultural pos-

session of nature or satiny landscapes. Likewise, nature was neither a

genre nor an object of cultural sentiments in his early landscapes.

"One might put this even more simply," observed John Berger in Ways

of Seeing. "The sky has no surface and is intangible; the sky cannot be

turned into a thing or given a quantity. And landscape painting begins

with the problem of painting the sky and distance." 9 Morrison absolved these naturalistic teasers with the eternal shimmer of horizon lines.

Morrison imparted a common, personal, understated, and communal manner. He was liberal, to be sure, a romantic advocate of certain radi-

cal Native causes, and, at the same time, he was an elusive visionary. He

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justly resisted the notion that there was an essential connection between

traditional culture and creative art. He argued that the identity of the

artist does not decide the meaning or determine the merit of the art. An-

ishinaabe and other Native artists create more than the mere representa-

tions, primitive silhouettes and simulations of discovered cultures.

"I never played the role of being an Indian artist. I always just stated

the fact that I was a painter, and I happened to be Indian. I wasn't ex-

ploiting the idea of being Indian at all, or using Indian themes," he told

Galt. "But as my work became better known, some critics would pick up

on my Indian background, and they'd make something of it. I guess they

were looking for a way to understand my work." '0

Morrison created small pictures at the end of his career, at a time when

he was recovering from a lymphatic disease. The horizon pictures are visionary, surrealist, emotive expressions of color, contours, textures,

traces of light, and many images afloat. Mottled, mythic creatures, for

instance, are buoyant, suspended over the shore in the pencil and ink

picture Landscape/Seascape with Surrealist Forms: Red Rock Variations

(1984). The earth is burnt orange, the water is dark, the creatures are red, and the horizon line is a primeval union, a natural transcendence of

time, distance, and memory.

"I can see the lake change by the hour, from blue to yellow and rose"

outside the studio windows at Grand Portage. "Dramatic things happen

in the sky, with clouds and color," said Morrison. "The basic thing in all the paintings is the horizon line which identifies each little work as a

broad expanse of a segment of the earth." He created abstract figures of

nature with layers of primary colors. At times he used a muted palette

to "catch a range of light after sunrise or before sunset." The one "thing

that makes the little paintings vibrant is the layering of colors. I might

start with red, then stipple on the opposite or complement of that, blue,

then come back to red, then another cold color. The color way under- neath comes through to the surface and gives the sensation of shimmer-

ing movement." "

The natural world shimmers, a bounce of light and chance of colors.

Philip Ball pointed out in Bright Earth that "nature had more hues than

the artist." Morrison decidedly perceived the variations of natural light

and created a dance of hues by layers of primary, saturated pigments.

Ball noted that the "picture is never finished," because the colors change

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evermore with time. "No artist has ever painted an image frozen in time;

all painting is a perpetual process, with every scene destined to rearrange

its tonal contrasts as time does its work on the pigments." 12

Morrison said he was "fascinated with ambiguity, change of mood and color, the sense of sound and movement above and below the ho-

rizon line," and therein "lies some of the mystery of the paintings: the

transmutation, through choosing and manipulating the pigment, that becomes the substance of art." 13

Sam Olbekson noted in Akwe:kon that the horizon line "seems to twist

and turn along its length due to variations in the color and brightness

of the water and sky," and this "calculated tension between water, sky,

and horizon along with the energetic use of color and texture creates a

sense of receding space and invites the viewer into the work, and into

the mind of the artist." Morrison has "created a world of imagery that

speaks of the subtle tension, yet beauty in an environment changed by external forces." 14

Morrison explained many times that he was obsessed with the hori-

zon because he was born and matured near the shore of Lake Superior. Elizabeth Erickson asked him in an interview about his use of the words

"mystery" and "magic" as an artist. He answered that the horizon series

"has been an obsession with me, now and for perhaps most of my life.

And that, in itself, has a particular magic that maybe I'm trying to in-

terpret." The "magic of nature" is the sound of waves on the shore, the

ambient light, and the constant changes of the horizon outside his studio window.

"Someone mentioned the haunting quality of the texture" in the ho-

rizon series, said Morrison. "Then hidden underneath the pigment is

some kind of magic that one can't describe that is part of the artist trying

to bring out the potency of nature." 15

"I think of the horizon line as the edge of the world, the dividing line

between water and sky, color and texture. It brings up the literal idea of

space in painting," said Morrison. "From the horizon, you go beyond the

edge of the world to the sky and, beyond that, to the unknown."

Morrison returned to Lake Superior at the end of his life, and from his studio above the shoreline watched the inimitable colors of the horizon

forever change with the light. "I always imagine, in a certain surrealist

way, that I am there. I like to imagine it is real." 16

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ENDLESS SPACE

George Morrison was an introspective, meditative artist who was lib-

erated from racialism and poverty by chance, by his imagination and ambition, by his painterly associations, and by memorable Native revo-

lutions in aesthetics. Clearly, his creative deliverance was by nature, lit-

erature, light, color, latent visions, and by the analogies of horizon lines

and "endless space." Morrison praised a high school teacher who had encouraged his inter-

est in literature, especially the novels of Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities was his favorite novel, and he once cited the first lines, "It was the

best of times, it was the worst of times." Rightly, these crucial, compara-

tive sentiments might have described his situation as a student in public

school, a poor, disabled, Native from Chippewa City. The sentiments continue, "it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was

the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity," and more, "in short,

the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest

authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the su-

perlative degree of comparison only." " The French Revolution of the

novel, a time of chance, great conversions, injustice, and betrayal was not

an obscure metaphor for his own adventures and sense of survivance as

an artist in the shadow of the Great Depression in America.

He completed his studies at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1943, and, with an Ethel Morrison Van Derlip scholarship, continued at the

Art Students League in New York City. Expressionism, cubism, surreal- ism, and other art movements were eminent and unmistakable influ- ences at the time.

Morrison painted abstract expressionist figures and landscapes that

were exhibited in several galleries with the work of other young artists.

Three Figures, his gouache and ink on paper, for instance, was a radical

departure from the academic portraiture and realism taught at the Min-

neapolis School of Art.

The figures were elongated, "very somber works, with dark colors,"

he explained. He ascribed the latent source of the figures to a compli-

cated romantic association with an art student, Cicely Aikman. "Our re-

lationship lasted until" her former boyfriend "returned from the war."

Morrison was exempt from military service because of a disability. He

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explained that the "paintings contain the symbolism of three people; one of them is me." 18

Morrison encountered Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and other abstract expressionist painters at the Cedar Street Tav-

ern in Greenwich Village. "The bar wasn't a showy place with art work on

the walls. It was just a common bar. Dark wood and booths. Bland would

be a good word for it," he reminisced. "Though they were the 'big boys,'

gestural painters at the height of their notoriety, the camaraderie was

such that they didn't walk around and act superior. They were friendly

to everyone."'9 Morrison, at the time, lived in a studio nearby on East

Ninth Street near Cooper Union. "The Cedar was the cathedral of American culture in the fifties," ob-

served a painter in Republic ofDreams, a history of Greenwich Village by

Ross Wetzsteon. "But the critic Leslie Fiedler saw it differently. 'In all that

aggression and machismo there was always a trace of hysterical despera- tion."' The "Cedar became a kind of intersection between the first and

second generation of abstract expressionists" after the tragic death of Jackson Pollock.20 Morrison was an inspired expressionist painter, but

he was never consumed by chauvinism, desperation, or frenzy.

Morrison summered with other artists at Provincetown on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The town reminded him of Grand Marais on Lake

Superior. He was roused by the light and many moods of the ocean. The

great curve of the beach became a source of driftwood, the natural start

of his intricate found and prepared wood collages. He called the con-

structions "paintings in wood," the "texture of oil painting." The wood

landscapes were connected to the earth and yet "come from the water.

I realize now that in making these I may have been inspired subcon- sciously by the rock formations of the North Shore." 21

He received a Fulbright grant in 1952 to study in France. He sailed on

the Queen Mary with his wife, Ada Reed, an art student, and Kobi, a black

poodle he secured in an art trade, and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-

Arts in Paris. Later that year he was at the University of Aix-Marseilles.

"In Europe I did a lot of things on paper, some with wash and ink, some

gouache," but "very few oils because of the bulk." 22

Morrison received an Opportunity Fellowship from the John Hay Whitney Foundation the following year and moved from the C6te d'Azur to Duluth, Minnesota. "Maybe I wanted to be back in Minnesota

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or back with my family, I'm not sure. With the fellowship, I had money

to live on without having to work."23 Assuredly, by that time his work

was widely exhibited, favorably reviewed, and acquired by collectors and

museums. His painting Construction was purchased by the Walker Art

Center, for instance, and was pictured in a feature story in the Duluth

News-Tribune. Morrison was reasonably secure as an artist, but he and

his first wife would soon separate and divorce.

Walter Chrysler, a celebrated collector of expressionist art, bought Au-

reate Vertical and two other paintings by Morrison. The vertical character

dominated his work in the late fifties. "You could say paintings like Aure-

ate Vertical," a large golden painting on canvas, had "structures within

a landscape space." These works were described as "endless space," and with no horizon line. The expressionistic space reached outside the can-

vas. The notion of untold, boundless space "struck some people as ex-

plosive and destructive," in other words, destructive of the "objective in

painting, not showing a literal subject matter." 24

Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, and other abstract expressionists

presented their work with unrenowned artists at minor galleries. Mor-

rison was included in many of these shows and soon became part of the art scene. Hofmann was an influential artist and teacher who advo-

cated an escape from "the tyranny of reality," observed Ross Wetzsteon,

and "to integrate the natural world with an individual temperament." Hofmann "saw art as a spiritual quest, and scornfully rejected psycho-

logical subtexts or ideological preconceptions--his gospel was the pu- rity of painting." 25

Morrison had anticipated these sentiments of nature in his expres-

sionistic art. Clearly, he lived in a constant, creative space, through his

memories, travels, painterly associations, and the camaraderie of Green-

wich Village. By then his work had been acquired by the Whitney in New

York, the Joslyn in Omaha, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and many

"other museums in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Richmond, Utica, and Roch- ester, New York." 26 Morrison would return from the "endless space" of

his work to the more familiar abstractions of nature, the magical horizon

lines of Lake Superior.

He taught at his alma mater, the Minneapolis School of Art, for a short

time in 1959, and while he was there the Kilbride-Bradley Gallery spon-

sored a special show of his recent paintings. John Sherman reviewed the

show in the Minneapolis Tribune. "Morrison over the years has edged

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away from figurative painting and now is almost entirely devoted techni-

cally, to pattern and texture, in a rich repertoire of colors." His "pieces

project as visual music in various keys and harmonies."

"The paintings seem to originate in a deep composure rather than stirred by external excitement, and they strike inner chords while pleas-

ing the eye. They are animated by different schemes. In some there is a

calm vertical flow, in others there is a blazing centripetal movement,"

observed Sherman. An "art of sensitivity and range, essentially lyrical

and subjective. It discloses an experienced skill in setting up the coun-

terpoint and tensions which induce you to gaze for a long time, seeking out the secrets imbedded there." 27

Morrison, in 1963, was appointed an assistant professor at the pres-

tigious Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He and his fam- ily continued their summer visits to Cape Cod. He found driftwood on

the beach for collage "paintings." Some of the wood had "bits of paint"

washed gray by the waves, rust stains, and the aesthetic texture and color

of nail holes. "There was an interesting history in those pieces," a trace

of "who had touched them, where they had come from." 28

"I selected colors at random for a given spot on the collage," as in "my abstractions," explained Morrison. "I clustered little pieces of wood

alongside bigger ones. But unlike the abstractions, the wood collages are

clearly based on landscape." Sam Sachs, director of the Minneapolis In-

stitute of Arts at the time, bought the first abstract wood "painting."

Morrison sold his wood collages on commission to several corporations

and never had one of his own. "Whenever I finished a piece, it was al-

ready sold."29

Morrison received an honorary master of fine arts degree from the

Minneapolis School of Art in 1969. The following year he resigned from

the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design and accepted a position

in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. "I wanted to

come back to the Indian connection, to Minnesota and my family," he

explained. "I felt an inner need to come back, not realizing the conse- quences of what I was doing. I felt the need to put certain Indian values

into my work." 30 The following year he accepted a permanent position

in the Studio Arts Department.

The Walker Art Center, in 1974, sponsored a show of his pen and ink

drawings, textured lines that revealed elements of cubism and surrealism.

The drawings show a horizon line, and one "represents a tree coming

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through from the bottom to the top of the drawing. That was very sub-

conscious."31 Philip Larson observed an "analogy to landscape" in the drawings and, in an interview, asked Morrison about the horizon line.

"There was one thing I started out with in each drawing," responded Morrison. "I'd draw a pencil line one quarter from the top to indicate

the horizon line. I wanted to make that very evident," and that "gives it

the tangible evidence of landscape, the top sky plane, and the lower water

or land plane."

Larson asked, "Do you think there are still figurative or referential

elements in your art?" Morrison equivocated, "They are remote and hidden. Only an organic suggestion remains. The abstract context takes

over" in the drawings. The curved lines denote "any kind of figurative

element, like breasts, sexual organs, plants, water or clouds. In the new

drawings, it went into a more pure state and the overall textural surface

became more formal. The drawings are laid out with precise straight and

curved lines, all the same distance apart, and the whole surface is evenly

textured. There is an effect of shallow cubist depth made with overlap-

ping lines, and a sense of indefinite space extending outwards from all

four sides." The "illusionistic qualities come from the lines." 32

Most of his pen and ink drawings create illusions or surrealist, cubist

perceptions, but the virtual motion of the lines in others is a mirage of

nature, not merely an inaccurate perception. The intricate lines seem to move, as in the natural motion of the wind. Morrison created virtual

analogies of landscapes in the "endless space" of his large vertical ex- pressionistic paintings, and in horizon lines, the shimmer of nature and

memory. Analogies are "inherently visual," a natural move to "tentative

harmony," declared Barbara Stafford in Visual Analogy. She would "re-

cuperate analogy," an eternal, natural harmony, "as a general theory of

artful invention" and practice.

"Today, however, we posses no language for talking about resemblance,

only an exaggerated awareness of difference." The world is "staggering

under an explosion of discontinuous happenings exhibited as if they had

no historical precedents." Stafford argued that without a "sophisticated

theory of analogy, there is only the negative dialectics of difference, end-

ing in the unbreachable impasse of pretended assimilation." 33

Morrison was born and raised in the presence of natural reason, visual

analogies, color, and the shimmer of horizons, a "magic of the earth."

He resisted, as his Native ancestors had done, the cursory disanalogies

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of nature, the insular notions of realism, naturalism, and academicism

in the course of his abstract expressionist paintings, wood collages, and

line drawings. He never lost his sense of natural reason, visual analogies

of nature, and the magical hues of a horizon.

Morrison retired from the University of Minnesota in 1983. He was

honored with a special exhibition, George Morrison: Entries in an Artist's

Journal, at the University Gallery. "It was like putting my private diary

on public display," said Morrison. "Throughout my career the sketch- book or journal has been an intimate source of personal expression." The

journal was a narrative of surrealist expressions, creative ideas, and "auto-

matic drawing techniques to record an inner solitude and loneliness."34

Shortly after his retirement, he built a house and studio on the Grand

Portage Reservation. The Lake Superior shoreline was only twenty-four

steps below the deck of his studio. The sound of the lake was constant,

the color of the horizon protean. At about the same time, he was diag-

nosed with Castleman's disease of the lymphatic system. "I started to

think about summing up my life, about legacies," he told Margot For-

tunato Galt. "I wanted to work on more sculptural ideas and do more

drawings. I wanted to have a big show, a lifetime show that would pull

my work together. I didn't know if I would have the time." His immune

system had been weakened by the disease, and by "radiation and che-

motherapy treatment." Morrison created small horizon paintings dur-

ing his treatment and recovery. "The basic thing in all the paintings is

the horizon line which identifies each little work as a broad expanse of a

segment of the earth." 35

Morrison painted in a "small format" because of his disease. "During

his convalescence he began painting on small panels, most about six by eleven inches," noted Charleen Touchette in American Indian Art. The

paintings varied by hues and saturation of color, "tone, texture and ap-

plication of paint." Sixty-one of these inspired landscapes comprise the

series Red Rock Variations: Lake Superior Landscape.36 Mark Rollo wrote in The Circle that Morrison was modest about his

eminence as an artist and that he was not sentimental about "growing old." Morrison said it "would be 'kind of nice' to have his ashes scattered

in the big water" of Lake Superior and the Atlantic Ocean. "One always

wants to live longer, of course. You feel that your life is just beginning and

you need more time. You wish you had another lifetime." 37

Morrison was honored by a retrospective of his creative work in 1990.

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The Minnesota Museum of Art in Saint Paul and the Tweed Museum of

Art in Duluth sponsored the exhibition Standing in the Northern Lights.

The name of the retrospective was one of his sacred names. Sixty-seven

works, including four wood collages, expressionistic paintings, and hori-

zon scenes, were presented. The exhibition also traveled to the Plains Art

Museum in Moorhead, Minnesota. The Rhode Island School of Design

awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 1991.

"My art is my religion," declared Morrison in This Song Remembers.

"I've tried to unravel the fabric of my life and how it relates to my work.

Certain Indian values are inherent-an inner connection with the peo-

ple and all living things, a sense of being in tune with natural phenom-

ena, a consciousness of sea and sky, space and light, the enigma of the horizon, the color of the wind."38

George Morrison died at age eighty on April 17, 2000, in Grand Marais,

Minnesota. Mary Abbe reported in the Minneapolis StarTribune that Morrison was "one of Minnesota's most distinguished and beloved art- ists." She noted that like "Claude Monet's famous Impressionist paint-

ings of the Seine River, Morrison's abstractions reflected" Lake Superior's

"ever-changing moods. Their common motif is a horizon that burns fiery red, flares pink or modulates to dusky blues and dappled greens

depending on the season, weather and time of day." 39 Morrison, though,

created a more memorable horizon line that shimmered with the magic

of nature not impressions of the city. He is also honored for his public

works in Minneapolis, including an enormous wood mural at the Ameri- can Indian Center, a totem in the LaSalle Plaza, and an abstract stone mosaic sidewalk on the Nicollet Mall.

George Morrison wore the seasons of Native survivance and crucial

waves of culture on his face. He was wounded by disease and sustained by natural reason and an eminent artistic vision. There were abstract traces

of winter on his brow, the intricate light of spring and autumn in his

eyes, and the blaze of summer colors in his stories. Morrison is forever

at the "edge of the world," a Native shimmer on the horizons he painted.

NOTES

1. Truman Lowe, Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and Allan

Houser (Washington Dc: Smithsonian National Museum of the American In- dian, 2004), 10.

658 Vizenor: George Morrison

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2. George Morrison, as told to Margot Fortunato Gait, Turning the Feather

Around: My Life in Art (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1998), 146.

3. The Chippewa and Ojibwe are the Anishinaabe in the language of the people.

4. Jane Katz, ed., This Song Remembers: Self-Portraits of Native Americans in

the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 53-60.

5. John Nichols and Earl Nyholm, A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

6. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 29.

7. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 17, 18.

8. Lawrence Abott, A Time of Visions: Interviews with Native American Artists,

http://www.britesite.com/Native_artist_interviews/gmorrison.htm, 1998, 6.

9. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 105.

to. Morrison in Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 71.

11. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 170.

12. Philip Ball, Bright Earth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 107, 251.

13. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 168, 169, 170.

14. Sam Olbekson, "Beyond the Horizon: An Interview with Anishinaabe

Artist George Morrison," Akwe:kon: A Journal of Indigenous Issues io, no. 1 (1993): 27.

15. Elizabeth Erickson, "An Interview with George Morrison," Art Paper 6, no. 30 (1987): 28.

16. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 192.

17. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Dover, 1999), 1.

18. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 63.

19. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 97.

20. Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams, Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 191o-196o (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 552.

21. Morrison in Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 128; George Morrison:

Reflections, produced and directed by Lorraine Norrgard, WDSE TV, Duluth-

Superior, 1998.

22. Morrison in Galt, Turning the Feather Around, go.

23. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 92.

24. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 99, 104.

25. Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams, 528.

26. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 105.

27. John Sherman, "George Morrison's Art Lyrical and Subjective," Minne-

apolis Tribune, February 13, 1959.

28. Morrison in Gait, Turning the Feather Around, 125.

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29. Morrison in Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 142, 144.

30. Morrison in Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 135.

31. Morrison in Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 147.

32. Philip Larson, "George Morrison and Philip Larson: An Interview,"

George Morrison: Drawings, exhibition catalog, (Minneapolis: Walker Art Cen- ter, 1973).

33. Barbara Marie Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Con-

necting (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) 3, io.

34. Morrison in Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 163.

35. Morrison in Galt, Turning the Feather Around, 169, 192.

36. Charleen Touchette, "George Morrison: Standing on the 'Edge of the World,"' American Indian Art (Winter 2001).

37. Mark Anthony Rollo, "George Morrison's Superior Life," The Circle, De- cember 31, 1998.

38. Katz, This Song Remembers, 6o.

39. Mary Abbe, "Distinguished Artist George Morrison Dies," Minneapolis

StarTribune, April 18, 2000.

660 Vizenor: George Morrison

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