Sister Gertrude Morgan's religious artwork sets the tone for National Week of Prayer.A former street preacher who became an artist, poet, and musician, Gertrude Morgan painted biblical themes to illustrate her gospel teachings.
Let Us Pray
Sister Gertrude Morgan's religious artwork sets the tone for National Week of Prayer.A former street preacher who became an artist, poet, and musician, Gertrude Morgan painted biblical themes to illustrate her gospel teachings.
Born on April 7, 1900, in Lafayette, Alabama, Morgan moved to New Orleans during the late 1930s.… In New Orleans she became affiliated with the Holiness and Sanctified denomination, a loosely organized religious group that praised God through music and dancing. Morgan adopted the title "Sister" during the early 1940s when she became associated with two other street missionaries, Mother Margaret Parker and Sister Cora Williams.… Morgan later moved to St. Bernard Parish and became the nurse-companion of an elderly woman who owned the tiny house that later became Morgan's "Everlasting Gospel Mission."…
Visitors to Sister Gertrude's tiny mission were ushered into her Prayer Room where she alternately preached and sang her prayer songs.…
Morgan frequently portrayed the all-white Prayer Room in her tiny Everlasting Gospel Mission. Only her cloth-covered table, a piano, and a few chairs furnished this starkly bare room. In Come in my Room, come on in the Prayer Room, (shown above) a cross section of her inner sanctum, Morgan is seated at her table; nearby are her piano and several of her favorite paintings, New Jerusalem and The Eye of God. An exterior and an interior door lead to Morgan's sanctuary, and in a metaphorical comparison, Christ knocks on yet another door, providing a dual invitation into God's holy kingdom.
Source: Regenia A. Perry. Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992).
Pictured: Sister Gertrude Morgan, 1900–80, 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.