Norma Morgan was an African American painter and engraver born in 1928 in New Haven, Connecticut. She began painting at the age of nine and was introduced to Black cartoonist, author, and illustrator Elton C. Fax while attending James Hillhouse High School. Morgan graduated from high school in 1945 and attended the Whitney School of Art in New Haven. In 1947 she moved to the Phipps housing development in Manhattan, where jazz musician Thelonius Monk was her neighbor.[1] She went on to attend the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts and the Art Students League in New York. Morgan was subsequently invited to join Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17, becoming one of two African American women to participate.[2] She also joined African American artist Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop.
In 1951 Morgan won a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship that took her to England and Scotland. She spent 1951–53 and 1961–64 there, and that time launched a shift in her style from abstraction to landscape and an interest in featuring the moors of the region in her work.[3] Morgan won first purchase prize at Philadelphia’s annual print show in 1954 for Granite Tor, Cornwall, England, and that piece was acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her first solo exhibition was in 1959 at Bodley Galleries in New York.
Morgan died in New Britain, Connecticut, in 2017.[4]
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Notes
[1] Weber 2020.
[2] Weyl 2019.
[3] Weber 2020; Weyl 2019.
[4] Weber 2020.
References
Henkes, Robert. 1993. “Norma Morgan.” In The Art of Black American Women: Works of Twenty-Four Artists of the Twentieth Century. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
“Norma Morgan.” n.d. National Gallery of Art. Accessed July 22, 2021. https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.5026.html.
Weber, Bruce. 2020. “Norma Morgan: In the Lands of the Moors and Catskills.” In Learning Woodstock Art Colony. Accessed July 22, 2021. https://www.learningwoodstockartcolony.com/post/norma-morgan-in-the-lands-of-the-moors-and-catskills.
Weyl, Christina. 2019. “Norma Morgan.” In The Women of Atelier 17: The Biographical Supplement. Accessed July 22, 2021. https://atelier17.christinaweyl.com/artist-biographies/norma-morgan/.
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