Norma Morgan: Enchanted World is an exhibition of the late artist’s prints, watercolors, paintings and drawings, and spans over 30 years of her prolific yet under-studied career. The exhibition highlights Morgan’s ability to convey a spiritual experience through her landscape and portraiture work and to effortlessly transition from formal observation to magical wonder. While her prints are a testimony to her mastery as a printmaker, her mid-career paintings, which include experimental materials such as Day-Glo acrylic, shine a light on the artist’s inquisitive mind and inventive inner world.
Morgan’s unique visual language invites the viewer to step back to take in the entirety of her layered compositions and to look closer and notice the figures hiding in them. One of the two African-American women artists to study with Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, Morgan was a trailblazer as an artist and printmaker. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Library of Congress; the National Gallery of Art, and others.
The Academy Art Museum is proud to present this exhibition with loans from the Kerry and C. Betty Davis Collection of African American Art, Mr. Donnell and Mrs. Dorothea Walker Collection of African American Art, Mr. Freddie Styles, Mr. Darryl Love, and Dolan/Maxwell.
The exhibition catalog features essays by art historians Dr. Amalia Amaki and Dr. Christina Weyl.