George Morrison's exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Magical City: George Morrison's New York, showcases 25 works that illuminate the connection between Native art and American Modernism. The exhibition highlights the tension of living between urban New York and the Grand Portage Chippewa reservation. Morrison's art employs lush colors to portray landscapes while addressing themes of displacement and survival. His life experiences, including poverty and cultural challenges, inform his works, which possess contrasting titles reflecting the complexities of identity and existence.
Morrison's Abstract Expressionism flouts these cleavages with sumptuous irony: lush, often warm colours that idealise landscapes and urban scenes even as they expose the confrontational realities of displacement, prejudice and survival.
Born into poverty on the Grand Portage reservation, by the time the artist moved to New York in 1943, he had already survived severed hair, cultural obliteration and tuberculosis - what worse could the city have to offer?
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