George Morrison

George Morrison’s work reveals a mode of openness, of listening with the heart. Looking and listening he stands before the horizon seeking to penetrate its presence.

Morrison stated, "The horizon line became more of an obsession around 1967, and I have been using it ever since, as a focal point, to identify the landscape." This simplest of devices, the line formed where sky meets earth, repeated again and again becomes a mantra. As James Billings noted in his essay Morrisons’s Horizon, "His works evoke meditation, the mood which created them. One breathes more deeply, more slowly–the deeper the breath, the fuller the work; the fuller the work, the deeper the breath."

By entering into conversation with the work, by treating it as something that speaks, we become not just observers, but participants in that magical presence that Morrison captures in his work.

George Morrison (1919-2000) was born in Grand Marais, Minnesota. An enrolled member of Grand Portage Reservation, he attended Grand Marais High School and went on to the Minneapolis School of Art, now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. After spending many years on the East Coast and in Europe, in 1972 he returned to the Twin Cities to teach at the University of Minnesota. Completing his journey, in 1983 he returned to the area of his childhood, the North Shore. He died there on April 17, 2000. One of Minnesota’s most revered artists, he received numerous awards and honors including an honorary M.F.A degree in 1969 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Also in 1969 he was invited to visit Cuba on a cultural exchange program for the exhibition El Autentico Pueblo. In 1997, Morrison’s Red Totem was one of 12 works chosen for a special exhibition in the Jacqueline Kennedy Sculpture Garden at the White House. He received the first Master Artist Award in 1999 from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN.

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