Robert Morrison

Robert Morrison (October 20, 1941 – December 16, 2018) was an American artist and teacher. His practice spanned a broad range of media including steel, bronze, wood, watercolor, ink, paper, graphite drawings, acrylic paintings, glass and ceramics. He became widely known for his elaborate installations fashioned from sheet metal and other materials, many of which included sound as an integral element of the work. His installations were considered "among the strongest works of contemporary sculpture to be made in Nevada."

He earned his BA Degree in Art at Fresno State University in 1962 and his master's degree in Design at Stanford University. He taught art at University of California, Davis, and then went to work at University of Nevada, Reno as an Art Professor in 1967, where he made a lasting impression on students. His major public art commissions include a statue of Abraham Curry in front of the Nevada State Capitol in Carson City as well as the Fleischmann Planetarium Sundial at the University of Nevada, Reno. His most extensive exhibition, Robert Morrison: A Retrospective, included three decades of work from 1968-1998 and opened at Nevada Museum of Art in 2004.

Artistry Robert Morrison started his career as a painter in the 1960s. Frustrated that paintings could not achieve genuine flatness, he turned to sculpture, sandblasting images on opposing surfaces of glass cubes to evoke the 'negative space of sculpture."

In 1982, Morrison participated at an experimental poetry performance series called Pigeons at Pipers Working mostly with steel, fiberglass, and radio wire, his sculptures symbolized how figures are "bound in media, trying to speak."

Throughout his career, Morrison's work was in conversation with contemporary artists such as Bruce Nauman, Bill Fontana, and Paul Kos. Although his "heritage was modernist abstraction," his works uniquely played with conceptualist and Dada techniques such as "temporality, chance and wit." Ten steel plates, cut and folded in geometric shapes, hung from the walls, each with a thin metal rod welded to it. Speaker wires ran from these rods to stereo receivers and amplifiers in a hidden room that transmitted various radio signals into the steel plates, causing them to vibrate like "highly imperfect speakers."

In 1986, Morrison completed a large sculpture and sound installation, Tongues: The Half-Life of Morphine, for the Center for Research in Contemporary Art in Arlington, Texas. In O'Coeur, twelve narrow steel tubs filled halfway with water sit within claustrophobic wire screen booths. These tubs, the same dimensions as the tub Marat spent most of his time in, cultivated a "mineral scum" analogous to Marat's "scrofulous skin disease."

Major awards

1991 National Endowment for the Arts Grant 1990 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship: Individual Artist Award 1990 Sierra Arts Foundation Artist Grant 1990 Nevada Arts Council Visual Arts Award