Artist

Keith Morrison

born Linstead, Jamaica 1942
Also known as
  • Keith Anthony Morrison
Born
Linstead, Jamaica
Active in
  • Maryland, United States
  • Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Biography

Artist, teacher, critic, and curator, Keith Morrison is also a philosophical optimist. Beyond the ideological tensions between African and European values that he and others wrestle with, Morrison anticipates a genuine world culture in the twenty-first century.

In Zombie Jamboree [SAAM, 1990.76], a super-natural ritual reflects the voodoun religion's blend of African and Christian beliefs and ceremonies as it tests the very nature of life and death.

As phantasmagorical as Zombie Jamboree appears, it is a highly structured work in which the syncopation of color, shadow, line, and mass is as important as its imagery derived from diverse sources. Jamaican-born Morrison has conjured his memories of elderly people telling African stories about evil spirits emerging from ponds at dusk, while also recalling the drowning of a close family friend. Inspirational also was Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Benjamin Britten's opera, The Turn of the Screw, in which ghosts dance across a pond. From this ambitious melange of references emerges a forceful synthesis of visual narrative and cultural metaphor.

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan African-American Art: 19th and 20th-Century Selections (brochure. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art)

Works by this artist (2 items)

Laura Wheeler Waring, Portrait of a Lady, 1947, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Vincent Melzac, 1977.121
Portrait of a Lady
Date1947
oil on canvas
Not on view
Laura Wheeler Waring, Anna Washington Derry, 1927, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1967.91.1
Anna Washington Derry
Date1927
oil on canvas
Not on view