George Morrison: The Modernist Painter Who Never Left Lake Superior

In 1997, President Bill Clinton accepted a sculpture called Red Totem for the White House, and George Morrison became the first Native American artist to have his work recognized and displayed there. In April 2022 the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of five stamps honoring him as one of the nation's greatest modernist artists — and his home community marked the occasion with an exhibit, Connections, at the Grand Portage National Monument Heritage Center through October 2022.

A son of Chippewa City

Morrison, a son of Grand Portage, was born in 1919 in Chippewa City, just outside Grand Marais, Minnesota, and grew up with eleven siblings on the shore of Lake Superior. Chippewa City was home to many Grand Portage Band members, partly because it was close to building work around Grand Marais. Today only its St. Francis Xavier Church remains.

The church mattered to the Morrisons from its construction on. His grandfather, James Morrison Sr., was one of its elders and founders; he sat in a gray pulpit chair he had built himself, beside the door, greeting people and ringing the bell. Morrison later said that looking up at the church from Chippewa Beach, he saw the only remnant of his grandfather — and a symbol of the community and its life.

In 1998 the Catholic diocese gave the building to the Cook County Historical Society on the condition that no more religious ceremonies be held there. An exception was made for one: the funeral of George Morrison, who died on April 17, 2000.

The lake in the work

Morrison studied, worked and taught in New York and on the East Coast, and taught art at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. But he never lost his sense of where he began. On Cape Cod, Nantucket and other shores he went on searching for horizons, seashells, bones and driftwood, as he had on the beach below the church as a boy.

Lake Superior — Caribbean blue one day, ominous gray, whitecapped or silver the next — became, as he told a Minneapolis newspaper in 1999, an obsession for several years. He spoke of the lake's magical qualities and of wanting to be near it, part of it. Ideas poured through his hands onto canvas, paper, wood and stone.

Coming home

After retiring from the University of Minnesota, Morrison returned to Grand Portage. His studio there, called Red Rock, was his refuge; he knew every rock on his shore and could sit for hours watching the lake. In a 1987 reflection he described what drew him back: a reverence for the land and the lake, for the people he grew up with, and for the rocks and trees. Landscape, he said, crept gradually into his art through the indirect influence of land, water and wood — and he had never tried to prove he was Indian by making baskets or painting feathers.

Another of his Red Totem sculptures stands in the foyer of the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic in Grand Marais.

Sources

Based on "George Morrison," Grand Portage National Monument, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The original quotes George Morrison and draws on Staci Lola Drouillard, Walking the Old Road (2019); George Morrison as told to Margot Fortunato Galt, Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art (1998); Dragoš D. Kostich, George Morrison: The Story of an American Indian (1976); and Truman T. Lowe, Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser (2004).