Minnesota artist George Morrison will have his work on exhibition at New York’s Met in July

It was 1943, and a young George Morrison had just arrived in New York City from Minnesota, ready to dive into the art scene.

He stayed in New York until 1970, rising to become a celebrated Abstract Expressionist artist. A member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Morrison has had retrospectives in Minnesota and nationally, and even has his art on a stamp.

On July 17, the exhibition “The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition includes 35 works made during the late artist’s time in New York City. The artworks featured in the show come from permanent collections at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Historical Society, Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth, the Whitney Museum of American Art, private collections and more.

“It’s all about his love of New York, but also how he influenced the New York scene,” said Patricia Norby, the Met’s curator of Native American art. “He wasn’t just someone who was an artist, who was on the margins of the Abstract Expressionist movement ― he was literally shaping the whole AbEx movement behind the scenes.”

Themes of the show include his contributions to and influence on the American Abstract Expressionist movement as an artist, scholar and activist. He took on art critics of the time, like Clement Greenberg, challenging the art establishment of the 1940s and 1950s, which was heavily white and male.

The show focuses on his time studying at the Art Students League, his love of water, his time in Paris, his love of jazz clubs and jazz in New York City. The show also includes three of his “Horizon” paintings, so people can “understand the full aesthetic trajectory of his work,” Norby added.

Morrison has been criticized by some for supposedly “downplaying his Native identity.” He has been famously quoted as saying: “I never played the role of being an Indian artist. I always just stated the fact that I was a painter, and I happened to be Indian.”

“He really just was so engaged in his technique, his aesthetic process, his environment, wherever he was, whether it was an urban setting or, you know, the North Shore of Lake Superior, like he just was so absorbed in all of that that I think people often try to say, like he really tried to downplay his Native identity,” Norby said. “And I don’t think that was the case at all. It just wasn’t something he felt he needed to use to promote his artwork all the time.”

Morrison was largely successful in New York, and the exhibition also includes lots of ephemera: gallery texts, exhibition checklists, newspaper clippings, articles. The team at the Met also re-created the Art Students League art studio where Morrison would have worked, bringing another layer of history into the mix, as well as his influence on the New York art scene.

“I think George Morrison was definitely ahead of his time, and I think that a lot of artists today, both a lot of artists historically, but also Indigenous artists in particular today, are really inspired by his ability to do that and to be successful in a sort of broader moment and context,” said Kate Beane, executive director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art.

Although Minnesota is where Morrison was from, New York did something else for the budding artist.

“When I first arrived in New York, one of the things that I read was New York is a place that demands that you are truly yourself,” Norby said. “If you’re not yourself here, you will not make it. And I think George fully became himself while in New York.”