Happy Birthday Sister Gertrude!

From the Smithsonian American Art Museum's folk art collection, we feature a work by visionary artist Gertrude Morgan.

Gertrude Morgan, born on this day in 1900, was raised as an active member of the Southern Baptist church . . . After moving to New Orleans in 1939, she began her missionary work as a singing street preacher and soon joined a "sanctified" fundamentalist church where the services emphasized singing, music, and dancing. With two other street missionaries in the early 1940s, "Sister" Morgan built and operated a small chapel and center for orphans, runaways, and other children who required food and attention.

In 1956, Morgan began wearing only white clothing, anticipating that she would be the bride of Christ. She also prepared an all-white room in her house as the "prayer room." In 1966, Morgan claimed God instructed her to draw pictures of the world to come—the New Jerusalem. Her sermons on paper illustrate aspects of her life and visions, as well as her interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Her drawings, she believed, were composed by God, "Through his Blessed hands as he take my hand and write . . . I just do the Blessed work." Come in my Room derives its title from one of Morgan's original songs and includes a vignette of Morgan in her prayer room in the lower section. Several of her visionary paintings hang on the wall.

Source: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: For the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

Pictured: Sister Gertrude Morgan, (1900–1980), Come in my Room, come on in the Prayer Room,about 1970, tempera, acrylic, ballpoint pen, and pencil on paperboard, 12 1/8 x 23 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson.