On View
Not on viewObject number2012.55
Altar
Artist
Keith Morrison
(American (b. Jamaica), 1942-)
Date1998
Mediumwatercolor
Dimensionsimage: 22 1/4 in. × 30 in. (56.5 × 76.2 cm)
Credit LineGift of Claudia DeMonte
Exhibition History"Copley to Kentridge: What's New in the Collection?," KIA (Sept.14 - Dec. 1, 2013).
"Embracing Diverse Voices: A Century of African-American Art," KIA Traveling Exhibition, North Carolina Central University Art Museum (October 7 - December 12, 2016).
"Surrealish: The Absurd and Unexpected," KIA Galleries 2 & 5 (June 4 - September 11, 2022)Label Text"Altar is a watercolor painting of an electric chair made up of three crucifixes and an altar filled with offerings. It is simultaneously colorful and lively, as well as macabre and perhaps unsettling. Death is a recurring theme in the work of Keith Morrison. As a young child, he was raised by his grandmother, and they would often read about someone she knew who had died, or attend a funeral or a burial. Morrison credits his Caribbean upbringing for his interest in death. In Morrison’s experience, in Jamaican culture, death is not taboo and is often talked and joked about. Many of his works represent his multicultural background. For example, in Altar, he depicts an African mask alongside Christian iconography of three crucifixes. Curator Julia McGee has said about Morrison’s work, “[In] engaging personal, local, and global concerns, Morrison’s visual language includes a vernacular vocabulary that is quintessentially diasporic, if not nomadic. His pictorial and iconographic clues connect but do not bind his work to a black or Caribbean diaspora. Responsive to past and present histories, influenced by music, literature, and his physical environs, Morrison describes his process as ‘more intuitive than intellectualized.’”" [from the exhibition, Surrealish: The Absurd and Unexpected, 2022]
