Nyeema Morgan | |
---|---|
Born | 1977 (age 46–47) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US |
Alma mater | Cooper Union School of Art (BFA) California College of the Arts (MFA) |
Known for | Conceptual art, installation art |
Notable work | Like It Is: Those Extraordinary Twins yawar mallku (sculpting elsewhere in time / the arc of the moral universe is long… / the Lesson, pt. 2) |
Website | nyeemamorgan |
Nyeema Morgan (born 1977) is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Working in drawing, sculpture and print media, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Morgan's works are in the permanent collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection.
Morgan was born in 1977 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to artists Arlene Burke-Morgan and Clarence Morgan. She was raised in Greenville, North Carolina and attended South High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [1] As a youth artist she was mentored by artists Rafala Green, Seitu Jones and Ta-coumba Aiken and was among the seventeen young artists selected to recreate a work by muralist John T. Biggers on an Olson Memorial Highway sound barrier as part of the North Community Mural Project. [2]
Morgan attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where she earned her BFA in 2000. [3] She earned her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2007. [4] She was an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2009. [5]
Morgan is a mixed media and installation artist. Her works incorporate text-based media, sculptural elements, and drawing [3] and focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. [6] [7] She has described her work as exploring the "personal and cultural economy of knowledge through familiar artifacts". [8] As of 2021 [update] , she has had nine solo or duo exhibitions and has held residencies at Smack Mellon and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. [6]
Morgan's solo and two person exhibitions include THE STEM. THE FLOWER. THE ROOT. THE SEED. at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Asians Smaisians and Other Racial Slurs with the artist Mike Cloud at the Marlborough Contemporary Gallery in New York, horror horror at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine, and I, Rhinoceros at the Staniar Gallery at Washington and Lee University. Her work has been part of numerous group exhibitions including at The Drawing Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem (in collaboration with artists William Cordova and Otabenga Jones & Associates), Galerie Jeanroch Dard, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the Museum of African and Diasporan Arts. [9] [10] [5] [11] [12] [13] [14]
Morgan has participated in artist residencies including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Program (2013), Smack Mellon (2015), Aljira: Emerge 10 (2007), Abrons Art Center Airspace Program (2010) and Shandanken Project at Storm King Art Center (2016). She has been the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant and an Art Matters Foundation Grant. Morgan has lectured on her work at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Minnesota, Washington and Lee and University and Brooklyn College (City University of New York). [15] [16] [17]
In 2013, Morgan participated in the Afrofuturist exhibition The Shadows Took Shape at the Studio Museum in Harlem. [18] She was among the artists to construct a miniature wooden spacecraft modelled on the Star Wars spacecraft the Millennium Falcon [19] with Otabenga Jones & Associates and William Cordova. [20] A tiny replica of Eldridge Cleaver's book Soul on Ice was included in the spacecraft's library, which is devoted to cultural studies. [9] This work, titled yawar mallku (sculpting elsewhere in time / the arc of the moral universe is long… / the Lesson, pt. 2), is a permanent member of the Menil Collection. [21]
Morgan's work Forty-Seven Easy Poundcakes Like grandma Use To Make consists of a series of text-based digital drawings printed on index cards based on recipes for "easy pound cake". [4] She started the series in 2007 after experiencing a Starbucks pound cake that did not compare favorably with memories of her grandmother's version. [22] This led her to an exploration of the authenticity of pound cake and the discovery of only 46 recipes on the Internet with distinct methods of preparation or ingredients. She edited each recipe against her grandmother's, using a procedure of striking or layering words and changing their positions until the drawing resembled what a Wall Street Journal reviewer referred to as "Etch-a-Sketch-like patterns that both emphasize words and constrain them". [4] The series of 47 drawings debuted at The Bindery Projects in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2012 [23] as part of the exhibition The Dubious Sum of Vaguely Discernable Parts. [24] An opening for a solo exhibition featuring the series at Brooklyn's BRIC Arts Media in 2013 included 47 actual pound cakes baked by volunteers based on each different recipe. [4] [25]
The 2018 exhibition Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art included Morgan's 2016 work Like It Is: Those Extraordinary Twins. [26] The graphite drawing depicts a scanned representation of the title page of a 2005 edition of The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain's 1894 book, cropped to only include the text "those extraordinary twins". The left side of the work includes a double silhouette, ostensibly of the artist at work. [27] The following page's underlying text is visible in the drawing. [28] Like It Is: Those Extraordinary Twins is in the permanent collection of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. [29]
Morgan's 2020 solo exhibition THE STEM. THE FLOWER. THE ROOT. THE SEED. at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by London based curator Rose van Mierlo, was part of the museum's yearlong programming during the centennial of women's suffrage. Works included were: THE STEM. THE FLOWER. THE ROOT. THE SEED., a figurative installation featuring printed material, The Flower, No. 4, that the audience could take from the exhibition; The Flower, No. 3, an installation of discretely placed white vinyl text throughout the gallery space that alluded to the narratives about the lives of women, both fictional and real; Soft. Power. Hard Margins., a suite of seven sculptures that address the "permissive authority" of historical art works by women artists. This piece explored archetypes of femininity through the combination of images obscured with references to narratives in cutout lettering set in ornately framed shadowboxes. [30] [31] Curator van Mierlo said that Morgan's art was "brilliant at deconstructing this mechanism of mythmaking as a cultural and historical process, while at the same time enveloping the audience in a form of storytelling of her own." [31]
Morgan lives in Chicago and is married to artist Mike Cloud. They have two children. [32]
Lee Bontecou was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world. She kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s. Bontecou made abstract sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s and created vacuum-formed plastic fish, plants, and flower forms in the 1970s. Rich, organic shapes and powerful energy appear in her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Her work has been shown and collected in many major museums in the United States and in Europe.
Katherine Porter was an American visual artist. Porter is considered one of the most important contemporary artists associated with Maine. She resisted categorization. Through the medium of painting and drawing her canvases convey the conflict inherent in life. She expressed her ideas with a visual vocabulary that was "geometric and gestural, abstract and figurative, decorative and raw, lyric and muscular."
David C. Driskell was an American artist, scholar and curator recognized for his work in establishing African-American Art as a distinct field of study. In his lifetime, Driskell was cited as one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of African-American Art. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park. The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, is named in his honor.
Echo Eggebrecht is an American artist and academic known for landscape paintings.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has curated several important exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and FRONT International, the 2016 Portland Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2018. In 2014, Grabner was named one of the 100 most powerful women in art and in 2019, she was named a 2019 National Academy of Design's Academician, a lifetime honor. In 2021, Grabner was named a Guggenheim Fellow by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2024 Grabner was inducted into the Wisconsin Academy of Art and Science.
Lois Dodd, is an American painter and educator. Dodd was a key member of New York's postwar art scene. She played a large part and was involved in the wave of modern artists including Alex Katz and Yvonne Jacquette who explored the coast of Maine in the latter half of the 20th century.
Janet Fish is a contemporary American realist artist. Through oil painting, lithography, and screenprinting, she explores the interaction of light with everyday objects in the still life genre. Many of her paintings include elements of transparency, reflected light, and multiple overlapping patterns depicted in bold, high color values. She has been credited with revitalizing the still life genre.
Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.
The Colby College Museum of Art is an art museum on the campus of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Founded in 1959 and now comprising five wings, nearly 8,000 works and more than 38,000 square feet of exhibition space, the Colby College Museum of Art has built a collection that specializes in American and contemporary art with additional, select collections of Chinese antiquities and European paintings and works on paper. The museum serves as a teaching resource for Colby College and is a major cultural destination for the residents of Maine and visitors to the state.
Sheila Pepe is an artist and educator living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She is a prominent figure as a lesbian cross-disciplinary artist, whose work employs conceptualism, surrealism, and craft to address feminist and class issues. Her most notable work is characterized as site-specific installations of web-like structure crocheted from domestic and industrial material, although she works with sculpture and drawing as well. She has shown in museums and art galleries throughout the United States.
Amy Cutler is an American contemporary artist. Cutler received her BFA degree from The Cooper Union School of Art, New York, New York, in 1997. Her work has been featured in major surveys of contemporary art, most importantly the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is an American contemporary visual artist. She is known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is a professor at Williams College.
Elise Ansel is an American painter. She translates Old Master Paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. She draws upon familiar compositions from throughout the history of art. Ansel's paintings are derived and abstracted from Old Master paintings, modernising classical works. Ansel uses "an idiom of energetic gestural abstraction to mine art historical imagery for color and narrative structure, abstracting and interrupting representational content, in order to excavate and transform meanings and messages embedded in the works from which [her] paintings spring. [Her] work deconstructs pictorial language and authorial agency in order to address the myriad subtle ways the gender, identity and belief systems of the artist are embedded in the meaning of the work."
Lauren Fensterstock is an American artist, writer, curator, critic, and educator living and working in Portland, Maine. Fensterstock’s work has been widely shown nationally at venues such as the John Michael Kohler Art Center (WI), the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (ME), the Portland Museum of Art (ME), and is held in public and private collections throughout the U.S, Europe, and Asia.
Danielle Dean is a British-American visual artist. She works in drawing, installation, performance and video. She has exhibited in London and in the United States; her work was included in an exhibition at the Hammer Museum focusing on new or under-recognized artists working in Los Angeles.
Charles Steven DuBack (1926–2015) was an American artist, known for his large-scale paintings, collage, and drawings.
Torkwase Dyson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Beacon, New York, United States. Dyson describes the themes of her work as "architecture, infrastructure, environmental justice, and abstract drawing." Her work is informed by her own theory of Black Compositional Thought. This working term considers how spatial networks—paths, throughways, water, architecture, and geographies—are composed by Black bodies as a means of exploring potential networks for Black liberation. She is represented by Pace Gallery and Richard Gray Gallery.
Martha Bonnie Diamond was an American painter. Her paintings first gained public attention in the 1980s and are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and many other institutions.
Jessica Snow is an American abstract artist, filmmaker, curator, and professor. Distinguishing characteristics of Snow’s paintings and drawings include bright, vivid colors through a visual language that employs color, shape and texture Snow's sources of artistic inspiration include landscape design, ancient art history, and the natural world. Her presentation of these subjects is influenced by traditions of geometric abstraction, biomorphism, and color field painting. She lives and works in San Francisco, California, where she teaches painting, drawing and art appreciation at the University of San Francisco.
Nicola López (1975) is an American contemporary artist known for her drawings, prints, installations and collages.
I decided to reach out to the community of this institution and ask for volunteers to adopt one of the 47 recipes and to bake it.