Clarence Morgan

Clarence Morgan is a painter as well as Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis where he has taught since 1992. Prior to this appointment he served on the faculty in the School of Art at East Carolina University from 1978 - 1992. In the past three years he has been the recipient of a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, Mcknight Foundation Visual Artists Fellowship, Minnesota State Arts Board NEA/Regional Artist Fellowship and Jerome Foundation Study & Travel Grant. Earlier in his career, Prof. Morgan has received fellowships/grants from the Southern Arts Federation, Art Matters, and the North Carolina Arts Council. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts and University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Morgan's work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Rosenberg+Kaufman Gallery (New York), David Lusk Gallery (Tennesse), Art in General (New York), University of Minnesota's Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Tweed Museum of Art (Minnesota), North Carolina Museum of Art and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Galleries in Houston, Memphis, Atlanta, New York, and Minneapolis have represented his work. His work also appears in public and private collections throughout the United States. Over his career Prof. Morgan has participated in over 100 group exhibitions and nearly 30 solo exhibitions.

In addition to his studio work and teaching, Prof. Morgan periodically engages in writing commentary on the arts.

As a young artist I felt certain deficiencies about the very nature of art and the theoretical underpinnings that supposedly fueled its making and interpretation. However, over the years the act of reading has served to validate the integrity of my artistic enterprise. As far back as the early 1970s I have been drawing and writing in sketchbooks and keeping journals, partly in response to books and magazine articles I've read. I wrote responses. Yet I never thought of myself as a writer.
Only now am I beginning to feel comfortable thinking of myself as both a painter and writer. Only recently have I come to understand the inherent potential of both activities to arouse my intellect and stimulate my visual receptivity. Over the decades writing and painting have existed for me as parallel and isolated activities. Now I see that writing and reading together have turned the written word into an unsuspecting launching pad for speculative thinking. Furthermore, writing and contemplation have discretely worked their way into my aesthetic reflex.

Perhaps I should insert the qualifying term "emerging" to more accurately describe my writing efforts, which have expanded beyond notes jotted down in a sketchbook. I think of my writing experience as a peripheral function to my work as a painter. One advantage of writing is that it provides a way for me to play out theoretical, ideological and conceptual disparities and present them in a cogent manner. Writing provides a place for ideas to reside, mutate and reveal themselves in a slightly different context. Through writing, objects, ideas and beliefs can be contrary without reducing the effect of the other. The result of such variance is that I must deeply consider and re-consider my judgments and opinions.

It's hard to know whether the writing comes first, or the painting. The act of writing brings to the foreground the ghostly pressure of self-absorbed thought, which ultimately fuels my urge to paint. The process works in reverse as well, whereby painting is the catalyst that unleashes words in the form of written language. As suggested earlier, the sketchbooks and journals serve as a repository for responses to my studio work, pedagogical viewpoints, and more specifically the inscrutability of the artistic muse itself. The activity that provokes the desire to record my thoughts on a sheet of paper is not limited to the complexities of making art and the obvious need to emote, but also by the act of reading. Brought together, these activities have become my companion. As such, the mutability of thought takes up residence among the pages of my notebooks as a series of disparate jottings, quotes and annotations.

Admittedly, I am not secure about my attempts to write. Nor do I feel particularly comfortable with the connection between painter and writer. My tendency is to rationalize this relationship, to formalize it so it will have intellectual integrity. This strikes me as odd, since I don't consciously see painting or writing as a strategy or rational program geared toward the production of a specific end product. Meaning is much more mysterious to me. It is not something that I am anxious to grasp in my painting or writing. Writing opens the door to that which might be unexplainable or unknowable. Writing is material and immaterial at the same time. Letters on a page are vaporous - barely visible thoughts - or whispers in the dark (almost tangible, elusive and always malleable). For me, writing is not always approached with a clear rationale. Nor is writing a function of some systematic structure of thought. It is messy, unpredictable and filled with contradictions.