George Morrison American, 1919-2000

George Morrison was an American painter, sculptor, and assemblage artist best known for his lyrical abstractions and wood collages that draw on landscape, memory, and material presence. A key yet often underrecognized figure in postwar American art, Morrison developed a distinctive modernist language that bridges Abstract Expressionism and later assemblage practices.

Born in Chippewa City, Minnesota, and a member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Morrison studied at the Minneapolis School of Art before moving to New York in the 1940s. There, he became part of the downtown art scene and associated with artists of the Abstract Expressionist generation. While influenced by their emphasis on gesture and structure, Morrison maintained an independent path, grounding abstraction in lived experience and the natural world rather than pure formalism.

Morrison’s early paintings are characterized by dense surfaces, gestural mark-making, and subtle spatial tension. Over time, his work increasingly referenced landscape—particularly the shoreline and horizons of Lake Superior—without resorting to literal depiction. These paintings convey a sense of vastness and depth through layered color and rhythmic structure, suggesting place as an emotional and spatial memory rather than a view.

Beginning in the 1960s, Morrison expanded his practice to include assemblage, producing wood collages constructed from driftwood, boards, and salvaged materials. These works emphasize horizontality and material texture, echoing geological strata and shoreline forms. The physical presence of the materials plays a central role, transforming found wood into abstract compositions that balance rigor with organic irregularity.

In addition to his studio practice, Morrison was an influential educator, teaching for many years at the University of Minnesota. His teaching and writing emphasized the continuity between abstraction, nature, and cultural memory, shaping generations of artists. While his identity as a Native American artist was not foregrounded in early critical reception, it has become increasingly central to contemporary understandings of his work, which is now seen as expanding the narratives of American modernism.

Today, George Morrison is recognized as an important figure in 20th-century American art. His work is held in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, affirming his lasting contribution to American abstraction.