A self-taught African American artist, poet, musician, and missionary, Sister Gertrude Morgan (née Williams) was born April 7, 1900, in Lafayette, Alabama. The crayon drawings she created to illustrate her sermons often included text in the form of a poem, sermon, or Biblical scripture. She married Will Morgan in Columbus, Georgia, in 1928. In 1939 she received a divine revelation, a common occurrence in her life, to leave her husband and their Baptist church. Directed to head to New Orleans, she preached there in an animated Pentecostal style alongside Mother Margaret Parker and Sister Cora Williams. The three women also frequented orphanages and started their own local daycare center.[1]
Another revelation, in 1957, appointed Morgan as the “Bride of Christ,” and she not only began to wear exclusively white clothing but also painted her house, furniture, and Bible in white. Her undated Self-Portrait (CANTY) represents Morgan’s perspective on this union as one of joy and awe. In her work she characterizes herself as “submissive but not a servile Mammy, betrothed but not a hypersexualized Jezebel, forceful but not an angry Sapphire” in relationship to the “two Bosses,” God and Jesus, both of whom are depicted as white men.[2] Most of her artwork dates to the period following her revelation in 1957 until she received yet another revelation, in 1974, to stop drawing. With the exception of one work from 1979, Morgan did not create any additional art.
In the early 1960s, Morgan met the art dealer and entrepreneur E. Lorenz Borenstein. He displayed her work in his New Orleans gallery, Associated Artists, and helped her sell it in order to fund her missionary efforts.[3]
Morgan died in July 1980.[4]
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Notes
[1] Hills 2005; Yau 2017.
[2] Yau 2017, 120.
[3] Hills 2005; Yau 2017.
[4] Ibid.
References
Hills, Patricia, and Melissa Renn. 2005. “Sister Gertrude Morgan.” In Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection. Boston: Boston University Art Gallery.
Yau, Elaine Y. 2017. “Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Materials of Visionary Art.” In Beholding Christ and Christianity in African American Art. Edited by James Romaine and Phoebe Wolfskill. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
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