Sistuhs: Four African-American Self-taught Artists
Wildly imaginative forms and colors and an utterly ingenuous sincerity characterize the 39 works by four African-American women at Intuit. In Sister Gertrude Morgan’s Spider Drake Driving Cows to the Butcher Pen, multicolored cows tread a pathway that seems an ascent to animal heaven; Morgan also wrote on her painting that Spider Drake–a commanding figure who appears to be pushing the cows along–is “singing one of his spirituals.” The colors are as bold as those in children’s art, but they’re used in a complex and thoughtful way.
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Morgan (1900-1980) became a minister in the 1930s, traveling from Alabama to New Orleans to preach, and was called to be the “bride of Christ” in 1957. Her work was widely exhibited beginning in 1973, but her deepest commitment was to her preaching. In New Jerusalem angels are grouped around a cutaway image of a tall apartment building–perhaps a Jerusalem for our times. The angels’ bright red hair contrasts with their white robes and the blue sky, but even more striking is their similarity. Here, as in medieval art, the figures aren’t individuated even to the extent that Spider Drake is. Instead Morgan creates patterns: the angels repeat, as do the color schemes of the building’s rooms, which add yellow and blue to the angels’ white and red. At the same time, the irregularity of the forms suggests the vagaries of the artist’s hand. This is not a view of paradise made possible by Euclid filtered through Renaissance perspective but an eccentric, passionate vision.
