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Ree Morton, Prince and Princess from Signs of Love, 1976
Ree Morton’s evocative and prescient works, produced across a single decade, expanded the parameters of immersive sculpture to leave an enduring legacy in 20 th century art. Deeply influential on subsequent feminist and installation artists, her multi-dimensional practice channels the universal through the personal with idiosyncratic form and conceptual depth.
Born in 1936 in Ossining, New York, Morton, a mother of 3, graduated from art school in her 30s, following a period as a nurse and a housewife. Describing her evolution as ‘the feminist classic of out of the kitchen; into the studio’, she led a brief, nomadic life, working and teaching across the US before her death at 40 in 1977. Closely associated with both post-Minimalism and the feminist art movement, Morton employed a method of free association and poignant allusion in her varied practice, which encompassed sculpture, performance, painting and drawing. ‘A work of art has a unique quality’, she once observed, ‘it is that of clarifying and concentrating meaning contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experience’.
Drawing her themes widely, from nature, language and literature, Morton’s works are shaped by personal experience and memory. In her first sculptural assemblages, from the early 1970s, cartographic-style drawings combine with logs and branches, balanced, propped or stacked together with a distinct architectural idiom. References to forms of enclosure and shelter, along with a strong corporeal presence equally prevail in her first fully conceived ‘installation’, Sister Perpetua’s Lie (1973). Consciously navigating the viewer through space, it responds to the experimental novel, Impressions of Africa (1910) by Raymond Roussel, with quotations, drawings and objects in frames and structures graphically delineated with black wood. More personal in origin, the large-scale installation Souvenir Piece (1973) functions as an act of memory. Produced for the inaugural exhibition at the legendary Artists Space in New York, it borrows an archaeological language form, displaying drawings, maps, found and made objects in a ritual-style space, charged with mnemonic register.
In 1974, Morton discovered Celastic, a malleable textile more commonly used in theatre, which she sculpted into decorative, sentimental forms, such as ribbons, banners and flowers, that carry traditional associations with the feminine. First appearing in Bake Sale (1974), a sculpture that makes wry allusion to the domestic ties of women, it culminates with the exuberant iconography of her last major installation, Signs of Love (1976). Exhibited posthumously in the Whitney Biennial of 1977, the latter assembles an unapologetically romantic collection of Celastic words and be- ribboned forms in poised and balanced orchestration. Always present in her practice, language became increasingly central to the Celastic works, used in the mapping of names across a wall, or in flags and banners declaring words and phrases that seem to linger, like echoes, in the space and mind. Ambiguous in intent, Morton encouraged what she termed an ‘unconscious scanning’ in her works to draw out individual response from the viewer. ‘My perspective is situational,’ she reflected, ‘meaning here a concern for what one individual can be alive to at a particular moment…’.
Ree Morton was born in Ossining, New York in 1936 and died in Chicago in 1977. She was included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1973 and 1977. Her work has been exhibited at Kunstmuseum Bochum (2024–25); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2020); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2018 and 1973); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015); The Drawing Center, New York (2009); Generali Foundation, Vienna (2008-9); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1990 and 1974); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1985); The New Museum, New York (1980), touring to Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1980); University of Colorado Art Galleries, Boulder (1980); Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1981) and Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1981).