The Everlasting Gospel Mission of Sister Gertrude Morgan

One of the most interesting exhibitions in London at present has just been extended. The Everlasting Gospel Mission of Sister Gertrude Morgan at The Gallery of Everything can now be viewed until 20 December, with an online talk tomorrow at 6.00 pm.

Join Soul of a Nation curator Zoé Whitley, and former curator of the New Orleans Museum of Art William Fagaly, for an exclusive conversation on the legacy of Sister Gertrude Morgan within contemporary visual culture.This online conversation will address issues of class, race, faith and visibility in American art. It will be moderated by the founder of The Museum + Gallery of Everything, James Brett.

Register here or join on Facebook Live.

Photographed by Lee Friedlander, lionised by Andy Warhol, re-mixed by King Brit, the remarkable Sister Gertrude Morgan (née Gertrude Williams) was a rare and rarified figure in the aesthetic history of 20th century America: a confident female artist, whose visceral image-making went hand-in-hand with the saving of souls. 

Born in 1900 in Lafayete, Alabama, Morgan was as modest as she was larger-than-life. Her New Orleans Gospel Mission was a spiritual home for believers and non-believers alike. For it was here that she proselytised and painted and ratled her tambourine, when she was not out singing, preaching and teaching Bible to neighbourhood strays. These moments became the content of her legend. 

Morgan depicted the everyday alongside the divine, outputing her pictorial rhetoric onto any surface she could find. Scraps of card, window blinds, paper fans and serving trays carried her repertoire. They evoked a biographical other-wordly hybrid, where New Jerusalem resembled New Orleans, and where the good Sister’s marriage to Jesus, God or both, swirled among the heavenly bodies and eliptical texts. 

Although the Black Arts Movement was peaking on the East Coast of America, Morgan remained remote from their community, separated by not only by geographical distance, but also by artistic intent. She was a local Louisiana hero, even a star: a stout, middle-aged, African-American lady, who was successfully painting - and exhibiting her painting - at a time when few peers dared even expose their material, let alone in the racist, misogynist and conservative South. 

Often to be seen on the streets in her signature white pinafore, it was the performative nature of her practice which brought her to the atention of Larry Borenstein and Allen Jaffe. Working together, these high-octane stalwarts of the city brought Morgan’s work into dialogue with the wider arts community via Borenstein’s art gallery at Preservation Hall. Morgan’s prolific output led to a fast uptake amongst the New Orleans arts community of the 1960s and 1970s, reaching New York via Andy Warhol’s Interview and a 1973 article by Rosemary Kent. Major exhibitions were to follow, including the Corcoran Gallery’s barrier-breaking Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980 (1982), which toured the US. Almost 40 years afer her passing, a major retrospective curated by William Fagaly opened at New York’s American Folk Art Museum. 

Today Sister Gertrude Morgan has been rediscovered by a younger generation of American and international curators. Her work was most recently featured in Outliers and the American Vanguard Art (2019), curated by Lynne Cooke and travelled from the National Gallery at the Smithsonian (Washington DC), to the High Museum (Atlanta) and LACMA (Los Angeles). Her emblematic song I Got a New World in My View (1970) was featured in the Martin Luther King Jr biopic, Selma (2014); and her classic Let’s Make a Record was reworked by DJ and producer King Brit in 2005. 

The Everlasting Gospel Mission of Sister Gertrude Morgan is the first major gallery exhibition of the artist’s work to be seen in a European context.

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King Britt presents Sister Gertrude Morgan - New World In My View.

Traces of the unseen and the transient

On sunny days, while waiting for the train Peter S. Smith draws his shadow as it extends across the station. He constructs these drawings by sketching the outline in a couple of minutes while waiting for the train before adding the tone over the course of the journey. This daily drawing practice keeps him 'visually fit' while also providing inspiration for engravings and, more recently, paintings.

As Simon Brett has written Smith 'has always been one of the few artists to use wood engraving for a truly personal and genuinely contemporary vision, untrammelled by even the best conventions of the medium.' The paintings, drawings and prints that he recently showed at One Paved Court displayed playful and profound engagements with these shadow effects in work that combined abstract patterning, figurative representation of shadows and platform furniture with traces of the unseen and the transient.

The exhibition reflected Peter's his interest in normal everyday experiences and the ways that these can be transformed by the materials, processes and metaphors of a shared visual language.

Peter S Smith is a Painter/Printmaker with a studio at the St Bride Foundation in London. He studied Fine Art at Birmingham Polytechnic and Art Education at Manchester. In 1992 he gained an MA (Printmaking) at Wimbledon School of Art. Examples of his work can be found in private and public collections including Tate Britain and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His book 'The Way See It' (Piquant Press) is a visual monograph of contemporary work by a professional artist who is a Christian, which provides an illustrated introduction to the art of engraving. Simon Brett explains that Peter was: 'among a group of like-minded young artists who sat at the feet of the Dutch Calvinist art historian Hans Rookmaaker. Rookmaaker (1922-77), himself part of Francis Schaeffer's evangelical L'Abri movement, brought a deep understanding of contemporary art to bear on what a Christian might do in what then seemed like cultural end-times.'

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and a Member of the Society of Wood Engravers. His work is held in many private and public collections including, Tate Britain; The Ashmolean, Oxford; The Fitzwilliam, Cambridge; The Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and The Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada.

Simon Brett, in reviewing ‘The Way I See It’, said: 'Peter’s wood engravings and etchings are so much expressions of the identical sensibility, rather than exercises in contrasted media, that they subliminally make one think of him not as a wood engraver or an etcher as such, at all, but as a printmaker and an artist. Not all wood engravers achieve that, let alone effortlessly. He has done his printmaking MA, he knows all about techniques but he never succumbs to the flash or relies on the technically accomplished. He keeps his work and us always on the edge.'

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Duke Special - Condition.

Restoration engraving in Bankside exhibition

An engraving by Peter S. Smith which was commissioned for St John's Leytonstone to celebrate the completion of major restoration works to the church can be seen in the forthcoming Society of Wood Engravers exhibition at the Bankside Gallery from 27th January to 9th February.

The Society of Wood Engravers exists to promote wood engraving. It is the principal organisation and rallying point for those interested in the subject; it also maintains a lively interest in other forms of relief printmaking. Essentially, it is an artists' exhibiting society. There are around seventy members, practising artists who have been elected or invited to membership on merit.

Simon Brett has written that Peter S. Smith was:

"among a group of like-minded young artists who sat at the feet of the Dutch Calvinist art historian Hans Rookmaaker. Rookmaaker (1922-77), himself part of Francis Schaeffer's evangelical L'Abri movement, brought a deep understanding of contemporary art to bear on what a Christian might do in what then seemed like cultural end-times."

Brett writes that Smith "has always been one of the few artists to use wood engraving for a truly personal and genuinely contemporary vision, untrammelled by even the best conventions of the medium."

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Iona - Let Your Glory Fall.