Sister Gertrude Morgan

All Artists: 

Portrait

About the artist

1900–1980, born in Lafayette, Alabama; lived and worked in New Orleans

A legendary figure of the French Quarter and the Crescent City at large, Sister Gertrude Morgan, with an irresistible charisma and evangelical zeal, ensured her spiritual and material legacy as preacher, prophet, poet, painter, and gospel singer. Although today celebrated primarily for her diminutive but ecstatic paintings of Biblical and personal divine revelation, inscribed in text and illustrated in images, her art practice was merely/but one facet of a life lived in pious service to the Lord. Born Gertrude Williams in 1900, on the cusp of a new century, and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, she nurtured a lifelong interest in art, making dirt-drawings as a child when she wasn’t working the fields with her farming family. In 1928, she married Will Morgan, and while living in Georgia in 1937, she experienced a divine calling to preach and paint God’s Word. Two years later she moved to New Orleans, establishing an orphanage and eventually a ministry out of her home, the Everlasting Gospel Mission. Her charitable and evangelical activities intensified in 1957 when God asked her to become “the bride of Christ”; she took to wearing exclusively white nurse-uniform habits and roamed the streets singing (accompanied by a tambourine) and spreading the truth.

––Brendan Greaves

Bibliography

Alexander, Wade, and Sister Morgan. God’s Greatest Hits. Los Angeles: Stanyan Books, in association with Random House, 1970.
 
Art Outsider et Folk Art des Collections de Chicago. Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998.
 
Barrett, Didi. Muffled Voices: Folk Artists in Contemporary America. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1986.
 
Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
 
Blasdel, Gregg N. Symbols and Images: Contemporary Primitive Artists. New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1970.
 
Common Ground/Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1993.
 
Crown, Carol and Charles Russell, eds. Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
 
Enisled Visions: The Southern Non-Traditional Folk Artist. Mobile, AL: Fine Arts Museum of the South, 1987.
 
Fagaly, William A. Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan. New York: American Folk Art Museum, in association with Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 2004.
 
Grootkerk, Paul. Art in the American South, 1733–1989: Selections from the Roger Houston Ogden Collection. Lafayette: University Art Museum, University of Southern Louisiana, 1993.
 
Hammond, Leslie King. Ritual & Myth: A Survey of African American Art. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1982.
 
Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.
 
Hemphill, Herbert W., Jr., and Julia Weissman. Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974.
 
Horwitz, Elinor Lander. Contemporary American Folk Artists. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1975.
 
King Britt. King Britt Presents: Sister Gertrude Morgan. (Audio CD) Philadelphia: Rope-a-Dope Records, 2005. (www.ropeadope.com)
 
Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, in association with the University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2001.
 
Livingston, Jane, and John Beardsley. Black Folk Art in America: 1930–1980. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi/Center for the Study of Southern Culture for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1982.
 
Louisiana Folk Paintings: Bruce Brice, Clementine Hunter, Sister Gertrude Morgan: the Museum of American Folk Art, September 17–November 4, 1973, New York City. New York, NY: Museum of American Folk Art, 1973.
 
McElroy, Guy, Richard Powell and Sharon F. Patton. African American Artists, 1880–1987: Selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection. Seattle: University of Washington Press, in association with Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, 1989.
 
Morgan, Sister Gertrude. Let’s Make A Record: Sister Gertrude Morgan. (Audio CD) New Orleans, LA: Preservation Hall Recordings, 2004. (www.preservationhall.com)
 
Out of the Boot: Self-Taught Louisiana Afro-American Artists. Los Angeles, CA: Afro-American Museum, 1989.
 
Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988.
 
Perry, Regenia A. “Contemporary African American Folk Art: An Overview.” The International Review of African American Art, vol. 11, no. 1 (1993): 6, 14–15.
 
Perry, Regenia A. What It Is: Black American Folk Art from the Collection of Regenia Perry. Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University, 1982.
 
Personal Intensity: Artists in Spite of the Mainstream. Milwaukee: Art Museum, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1991.
 
Powell, Richard J. Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997.
 
Rambling on My Mind: Black Folk Art of the Southwest. Dallas: Museum of African-American Life and Culture, 1987.
 
Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
 
Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, in association with Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1998
 
Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art from the South, Volume 1, edited by William Arnett and Paul Arnett. Atlanta, Georgia: Tinwood Books in association with Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures, New York, 2000.
 
Southern Works on Paper, 1900–1950. Atlanta: Southern Arts Federation, 1981.
 
A Time to Reap: Late-Blooming Folk Artists. South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall University/Museum of American Folk Art, 1985.
 
Trechsel, Gail Andrews, ed. Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-taught Art from the Collection of Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae-Yelen. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, in association with University Press of Mississippi, 1995.
 
Urgent Messages. Chicago: Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Chicago Public Library, 1987.
 
Wertkin, Gerard C. Millenial Dreams: Visions and Prophecy in American Folk Art. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1999.
 
Wilson, Charles R., and William Ferris. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
 
Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.

Artwork


30 South 17th Street, 12th floor | Philadelphia, PA 19103-4196 | 215.979.1155