: -"Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan" is
the first comprehensive traveling exhibition devoted to the
self-taught artist. It opens February 25 at the American Folk Art
Museum, 45 West 53 Street, and will run through September 26. It
will travel to the New Orleans Museum of Art, November 13,
2004-January 16, 2005 and then to Intuit: The Center for
Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago, February 11-May 28, 2005.
Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980) was an African American
self-taught artist, street missionary, musician, healer and poet
who used her diverse abilities as a vehicle for her profound
religious faith.
Comprising approximately 100 paintings and decorated objects
(fans, megaphone, lamp shades, guitar case), the exhibition has
been selected by William Fagaly, former assistant director for
art and Françoise Billon Richardson curator of African Art at the
New Orleans Museum of Art, in cooperation with Brooke Davis
Anderson, director and curator of the American Folk Art Museum's
Contemporary Center.
The exhibition will document both Morgan's artistic career and
her participation in a circle of jazz musicians, artists and
intellectuals in New Orleans. Although Morgan seldom dated her
work, the presentation will be divided chronologically into
early, middle and late sections, as determined by style, medium
and content, as well as arranged by themes such as "Jesus is My
Airplane," "New Jerusalem" and "Alphabets." Morgan's "Charters"
series will also be featured. These large, friezelike, narrative
paintings are illustrated with detailed depictions of consecutive
chapters from the Book of Revelation.
Born in 1900 in Lafayette, Ala., Morgan was the seventh child of
Frances and Edward Williams. As a member of the Baptist church,
she showed strong religious convictions as a youth, receiving her
first revelation to preach in 1934.
Several years later Sister Gertrude received her second call and
left Georgia to settle in New Orleans in 1939, "the headquarters
of sin," where she became a familiar figure on the streets of the
city's French Quarter. She would set up her paintings
illustrating passages from the Bible and preach the Gospel to
passersby, often singing in a deep voice and accompanying herself
on guitar or tambourine. Donations and the sale of her artwork
helped to support Sister Gertrude's Everlasting Gospel Mission,
the modest shotgun house in New Orleans' Ninth Ward where she
held nightly prayer meetings and other services.
Morgan began painting in earnest around 1956 (at age 56), stating
that the Lord had commanded her to teach the gospel in a
different manner. Her earliest work was executed in crayon in a
subdued range of autumnal colors. In 1957, the artist had another
vision that revealed she had been chosen to become a bride of
Christ. After that, she dressed only in white to symbolize her
spiritual marriage, gradually transforming both the exterior and
interior of the French Quarter mission with white paint and
furnishings. In her paintings she often adorned herself either in
a white bridal gown or a nurse's uniform. According to Fagaly,
Sister Morgan saw herself as a sort of spiritual nurse.
In the 1960s, Morgan's compositions became larger and more
complex and she began to use a wider variety of media, including
acrylic, tempera and watercolors. Her later work employs highly
complex compositions populated with crowds of figures that seem
to float heavenward. By 1970, Morgan's work was included in
exhibitions in California, New York and Louisiana. In 1982, two
years after her death, more than 40 of Morgan's works were
included in the exhibition "Black Folk Art in America,
1930-1980," at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
A 120-page illustrated color catalog, published by Rizzoli
International Publications, New York, in association with the
American Folk Art Museum, is the first solely devoted to the
artist. It has an essay and a biography by William Fagaly, and
essays by Helen M. Shannon, director of the New Jersey State
Museum in Trenton and a specialist in African American art and
New Orleans writer and historian Jason Berry.
Museum hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 10:30 am to 5:30
pm; Friday until 7:30 pm. Admission is $9; students and seniors
$7. Admission is free on Friday from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. For
information, visit www.folkartmu seum.org or call
212-265-1040.
