Norma Morgan (1928-2017)
Wild Tors and Liminal Spaces
Norma Morgan (1928-2017)
Wild Tors and Liminal Spaces
Wild Tors and Liminal Spaces
Norma Morgan was immediately drawn to the moors of the United Kingdom when she visited the country in her early twenties. No doubt, she had probably heard all about the rugged English landscapes from Stanley Hayter, a master printmaker and painter who ran the Atelier 17 in New York City, where Morgan learned the art of engraving. Hayter founded the influential Atelier 17 studio in Paris and was known for his development of viscosity printing (a process that exploits varying viscosities of oil-based inks to lay three or more colours on a single intaglio plate). He was also a Surrealist. Morgan returned to England from 1961-1964 - finding inspiration in nature and Romantic ideals of literature. The Romantic movement saw the moors as a symbol of nature’s raw beauty and power. Poets like John Keats and William Wordsworth celebrated the wild beauty of the natural world, and the moors often featured in these depictions. Their untamed beauty was seen as both awe-inspiring and sublime, representing nature in its purest form. These moors seem to exist in the sort of liminal space that is inhabited by faeries and other supernatural beings. Areas with large amounts of granite have long been associated with such activity and Morgan was tuned in to this aspect
of these landscapes, incorporating some of these beings in her engravings and paintings. Her engravings were able to bring out the shadow and light of this unusual landscape. She used a burin to cut fine lines into a metal plate (often copper). These incised lines hold ink when the plate is wiped and printed, producing an image on paper. It’s a highly detailed and meticulous technique and Norma was well suited for this kind of work.
When Morgan returned stateside, her work featured the vast and wild Catskill and Adirondack Mountains. The dense forests, granite outcroppings, and pristine lakes evoke a folklore similar to the English moors, with tales of mysterious creatures, ghosts, and trolls. The Catskills derived its name from early Dutch settlers - “Kaaterskill”, meaning “Cat Creek.”
Kaaterskill Falls is an iconic landmark here and a subject from her work. Morgan was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut and later lived in New Rochelle, New York and as an adult made her home in both New York City and Woodstock, NY. Morgan often brought her mother Ethel, with her on excursions to Woodstock and spent much quiet time connecting with the land by camping, hiking, and cross-county skiing.
EARLY LIFE
Norma Gloria Morgan was born in 1928 in New Haven, CT, the only child of Ethel Morgan. Her father died when she was only a baby. Norma remained close to her mother throughout her life; they lived together until Ethel’s death in 2011. At this time, Ethel supported the two by working as a housekeeper for the Reverend Stuart Means and his family. Quiet and resourceful, Norma displayed an aptitude for art at an early age. At 13, she was put entirely in charge of painting a school mural on communication when her teacher saw that her remarkable talent outshined the other students. She attended Hill House High School where she became introduced to Elton C. Fax. Later, he devoted a chapter to her in his book, Seventeen Black Artists, published in 1971. As a junior and senior she served as art editor for the school’s magazine, The Hill House Gleam
“What I liked to do was use my imagination, and I well remember my passion for drawing sailboats. How I loved the feeling of being free to sail away in my imagination to all sorts of strange places that drawing those boats gave me”1
After her graduation, she attended the Whitney School of Art in New Haven for
two years. In 1947, Norma and her mother moved to New York City. Elton Fax helped the two find a suitable place to live, which happened to be next door to none other than Thelonious Monk. Ethel started a business designing dresses, while Norma studied in the mornings with Julian E. Levi at the Art Students League. The afternoon was devoted to private study with Hans Hoffman from whom she learned the more technical aspects of composition. Levi focused much more on the emotional aspects of painting. These experiences led her to the aforementioned Atelier 17 with Stanley Hayter. Norma was one of two female, African-American artists there - the other, Evangeline St. Claire. Hayter included her etching, Granite Tor in his 1962 book, About Prints
LIFE ABROAD
Norma received the Whitney Traveling Fellowship from the John Hay Whitney Foundation which enabled her to travel to the United Kingdom from 1951-1954. In 1961 she received the John and Anna Lee Stacy Foundation Fellowship which provided the means for her to return.
In addition to her natural curiosity about the unusual terrain of the moors, Norma was deeply moved by the landscapes of
1 Fax, Elton C. Seventeen Black Artists: By Elton C. Fax. Dodd, Mead, 1971; 254.
Scotland painted by 19th century AfricanAmerican artist Robert S. Duncanson, whose work was the subject of an important article by James Porter which appeared in Art in America in 1951.
“The British Information Center provided me with the addresses of lodgings and farmhouses where I could stay. I went by freighter and I went alone. ” 2
Norma arrived in October on her first trip to the UK and stayed with a family who lived in a small “village on the edge of Dartmoor” the terrain of which seemed straight out of a Bronte novel. She mastered the quick sketch on the damp moors and retreated indoors to work out the details of her watercolors and engravings. On her second trip to the UK, she found lodgings and a lifelong friendship with the Wilkinson family in the remote town of Arisaig on the north-western highlands of Scotland. Beatrice, the matriarch of the family taught art locally and was a weaver and watercolorist. Norma became part of the family and was described as independent, fascinating, and good-natured. 3
2 ibid:259
Later, Norma received two fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and returned to the UK to Yorkshire and SW England with a jaunt over the North Sea to the Netherlands.
NEW YORK CITY AND WOODSTOCK
Upon her first return stateside Norma’s work was beginning to gain recognition. In 1955, Norma’s engraving, Granite Tor, won the first purchase prize at the annual print show in Philadelphia and was placed in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Soon after, the Museum of Modern Art, NY acquired Granite Tor and David in the Wilderness (etching). She was commissioned to make prints by the Library of Congress and Associated American Artists. Norma’s work was also shown at the Bodley Galleries, NY in 1959; and she received the Bainbridge Prize for work submitted to the Washington Watercolor Show.
When she returned the second time, Norma continued to be lauded and receive critical national and international acclaim. In 1966,
3 Conacher, Pamela M. “Two Worlds: Norma Morgan in Scotland & the Catskills.” Woodstock Art Colony, Woodstock Art Colony, 5 May 2023, www.learningwoodstockartcolony.com/post/two-worlds-norma-morgan-in-scotland-the-catskills.
she participated in the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal in the exhibition, Ten Negro Artists from the United States. Bertina Carter Hunter became a key advocate for her, and other Black artists, with the Counterpoints Guild, and Norma’s work was featured in their exhibitions.
Norma began dividing her time between NYC and Woodstock, NY where she had a small studio in a converted inn which was around 110 years of age. This was where she worked on her paintings - her engravings were executed in NYC. Music festival notwithstanding, Woodstock was originally known as a robust artist’s colony dating back to the 1900’s with the founding of Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and later the Art Students League summer school. By the 1960’s modernists and abstract expressionists were flocking to the bucolic area to escape the constraints of NYC. Here, artists could often connect their work to a greater spiritual vision and in this way, Norma was no different.
Norma continued to receive important commissions throughout her career. In the early 1970’s she was commissioned by the NY Historical Society to reproduce
naturalist artist, John Ruthvens painting, Carolina Paraquets. In 1983, after receiving the Woodstock Artists Association annual print award, she was given the opportunity to create an edition of 101 impressions of her engraving, A Catskill Winter. Her engravings and paintings continued to be shown in galleries and museums nationwide.
A QUESTION OF BLACKNESS
“Art goes beyond the Black experience, beyond the feminist experience. I do my protesting with a brush and burin.”4
Norma Morgan created a deeply personal oeuvre of artistic output, but it cannot be denied that she was a Black woman. Where did she fit in with other Black artists of her time period? It can be extrapolated that she found a quiet way of protest. Like the towering granite tors scattered across an unyielding landscape, the psychological isolation of the Black experience in America endures, shaped by centuries of systemic exclusion. These jagged, unmoving rock formations represent the barriers and divisions that persist—isolating individuals in a landscape that offers little space for connection or unity. Yet, just as the
4 Smith, Sandra Lewis. “Norma Morgan: A Matter of Balance.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 19, no. 1, 1985: 34.
granite tor withstands the harsh winds of erosion, so too does the resilience of Black individuals and communities persist, rising from a terrain that seeks to diminish them. Dwarfed by the size of the land, the figures navigating this terrain are both small and significant—marking their presence in a world that often overlooks them, yet carving out paths of survival, resistance, and hope in the face of overwhelming adversity.
In actuality, she was against depicting the African-American struggle in her art. In a letter to Cedric Dover, author of the seminal American Negro Art, she wrote that
“her idea of poetry and art…is to rise above the situation…I hope that my art does not limit itself by even national boundaries.” 5
In an interview for Black American Literature Forum Norma states,
“I think my scenes are inhospitable, often turbulent. They speak of struggle, man, and nature…I speak out with my art. Maybe this is my heritage: I channeled my protesting with my work. Maybe I wouldn’t be so good at marching and did what I could in my own way.”
“Hate takes away energy. I am by no means passive, apathetic, but my energy is directed to the copper plate, the canvas…I have a clear understanding of struggle. In New York City I see signs of decay in the beautiful old buildings. In fact, until recently, my mother
and I lived in a building that you could hear dying at night - plaster dropping like bodies in the damp walls. To find decent housing that is affordable is a struggle in the city. But what’s really important to me personally is being able to create, to have a creative mind and a healthy body.”6
CONCLUSION
“I am a very wealthy woman. I still have my family, my grandfather, my mother, and I have my work. I have all of this.”
Norma Morgan knew the rare privilege of living as an artist first, and she remained grateful for it. Working during a time of cultural and political upheaval, Morgan remained focused on her own vision— rooted in landscape, tradition, and technical mastery.
Norma died in 2017, but her work has been enjoying a resurgence of popularity recently. Her work is currently in an exhibition of prints titled, Engraving After 1900: A Technique in Its Time, Works from the Davison Art Collection, held at the Pruzan Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. She also has had solo exhibitions at the Woodstock Artist Association and Museum, NY (2023) and the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, CT (2024). i
5 Weber, Bruce. In the Land of Moors and Catskills. 2023. 6 ibid: 35
2002
hand-colored engraving 25-1/2 x 17-3/4 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 7/50
On the Heights 2004
hand-colored copper engraving 17-3/4 x 29-1/2 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 3/50
1952-53
Engraving on copper 7-3/4 x 14 inches
Signed, titled and dated Wild Doe tor Farm, Devon, England
1983 engraving 6 x 8-3/4 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 48/101
David in the Wilderness
1956 engraving
34-1/2 x 17-1/2 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 12/30
Friends n.d. etching 11 x 8 inches signed and titled
Nativity Scene 2013 etching
7-1/2 x 4-1/2 inches (image) signed, titled, and dated
Whiteface Mountain (Adirondack Mountains) 1990
hand-colored copper engraving 18 x 35-1/2 inches
signed, titled, dated, and numbered 4/50
Beethoven
1969 etching on vinyl 29-1/2 x 21-1/2 inches signed, titled, dated, and numbered 5/50
1998
hand-colored color engraving 17-3/4 x 35 inches
signed, titled, dated, and numbered 8/50
Tired Traveler
1951 engraving 10 x 8-1/2 inches
signed, titled, dated, and numbered 8/20
The Rising Tide
1966
copper engraving 7-1/2 x 5-1/2 inches initialed in plate
Norma Morgan’s Eco-Mystical Understanding
by Chenoa Baker, arts curator and writer
Norma Morgan (1928–2017) was an accomplished painter and printmaker with a proclivity for engraving, which she learned post-undergrad at Atelier 17. After her study, she lived mostly in the Catskills in New York but had also visited England and Scotland (supported by the Whitney Foundation), Utah, and Arizona.1 She also developed a love of nature because of “her interest in hiking, camping, swimming, and cross-country skiing. For a period she lived in an apartment on the second floor of 5-7 Rock City Road. Morgan traveled to Woodstock by bus (she didn’t drive), and the apartment was a short and convenient walk to the stop In the center of the village.” 2
Her typical iconography ranges from figurative or landscape to mythical scenes that combine both and treat the land as a body. Each work is a record of her unique lens of bio-introspection—the way she takes in, looks at, and synthesizes the natural world. She demonstrates that the land has agency and a complex thought life, as she imbues it with anthropomorphism.
This showcases the tension and often symbiosis between man and nature.
She begins this style in the ‘80s of “imaginary images of trolls, wood sprites, and elves into her soft green and emeraldtoned oils and watercolors - a reflection of her humorous point of view. The writer Sandra Lewis Smith felt that the imaginary creatures appealed to Morgan’s mystical side.” 3
For example, A Twilight Elf, showcases this delicate balance. A ray of light breaks between indigo, lavender, teal, and green clouds, presumably daybreak. Out of organic matter a bustling stream emerges and an animal-like mythical white creature roams.
“Bernard X. Bovasso applauded her talent and strength as an artist and astutely commented that Morgan ‘found the mystic stones, the dolmens and megaliths of Albion’s prehistory [wherever she looked] and challenged them with her burin.’ ” 4
1 . Marsie, Rebecca. “Norma Morgan in Context - Lyman Allyn Art Museum.” Lyman Allyn Art Museum - Celebrating the Power of Art since 1932, 24 Sept. 2024, www. lymanallyn.org/norma-morgan-in-context/.
2 Weber, Bruce. “Norma Morgan: In the Lands of the Moors & Catskills.” Woodstock Art Colony, Woodstock Art Colony, 17 Aug. 2023, www.learningwoodstockartcolony.com/ post/norma-morgan-in-the-lands-of-the-moors-and-catskills.
3 ibid
4 ibid
The remarkable process of engraving is carving lines into a metal plate and putting it through a press. Black Art Auction has several of Morgan’s plates which not only showcase the process but are evidence of the artist’s direct hand. Once in the press, the image must be recto-verso to translate onto paper. For example,Untitled copperplate, pairs with the print Tired Traveler. It in itself becomes an artwork because of the patina accumulated over time. Whereas the print, Tired Traveler, depicts a figure leaning forward, in an impossible position, with arms outstretched indicating repetitive motion.
Their face is obscured making them anonymous and more of a concept than a specific person. The chiaroscuro through cross-hatched line work has a worn-like quality to it. It resembles the emotive line
5 ibid
work of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencholia I (1514). Whether she intended or not, she was in dialogue with the history of the medium. Wearing down the psyche relating to Morgan’s emphasis on decay and erosion. “She believed this added a further dimension to ‘the visual scene’. Old buildings, hills, and the like all yield a good source for exploration…One is tempted to believe that [Morgan’s] deliberate choice of decaying, eroding subject matter—her harsh, desolate English countryside and her strong handling of it—are symbolic. Who is to say that the restrictions imposed upon her as a woman who is also Black have not evoked this kind of stark creative response?” 5 The figure is also disproportionately larger than the landscape, further emphasizing the anthropocene.
Harriet Tubman, 2002, hand-colored engraving
Harriet Tubman showcases a figure that’s not just illuminated, but is composed of light itself. As the main source of light, it illuminates the cave-like abstracted background. The use of salmon, light green, and blue that glimmers on the rock-like formation reinforces an iridescent effect. This subject matter relates to how transformations in nature represented a connection to her ancestors which imbues her work with an “aura of spirituality.”6
Overall, Morgan is an important figure in the canon because of her Expressionist approach to landscape, the episodic
breadth of her practice, and that she facilitates a communal experience of the lens of which she views nature. According to the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, she was
“not in communion with nature but in union with [it].”7
She believed in the potential of nature and was drawn to the not so ”well-worn artistic paths.” 8 But, instead, she wanted to make eroding spaces the protagonist of her visual narratives. i
6 Marsie, Rebecca. “Norma Morgan in Context - Lyman Allyn Art Museum.” Lyman Allyn Art Museum - Celebrating the Power of Art since 1932, 24 Sept. 2024, www.lymanallyn.org/norma-morgan-in-context/.
7 ibid
8 ibid
Church’s Ledge, Kaaterskill Cove
1986 watercolor
15 x 10 inches
signed, titled, dated
A
Twilight Elf 1994
watercolor 9-1/2 x 14 inches signed, titled, and dated
Untitled (Woman in Orange Dress)
1980 watercolor 14 x 10 inches signed and dated
Untitled (Two Figures in White) 1999 watercolor
10-1/2 x 14-1/2 inches signed, and dated
The Old Guide 1994 watercolor 14 x 10 inches signed, titled, and dated
Ethel Morgan, Designer, Performer
1992
watercolor 15 x 10 inches
signed, titled, and dated
1995 watercolor 14-1/4 x 9-1/2 inches signed and dated Untitled
Watercolor
14-1/2 x 10 inches
Signed, titled, and dated
Untitled (Figure With a Boat)
n.d. watercolor
10 x 12 inches signed
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
1944 New Haven YMCA
1945 New Haven Public Library (solo)
1953 Summer Exhibition: New Acquisitions; Recent American Prints, 1947–1953; Museum of Modern Art, NY
1959 American Acquisitions: Recent Additions of Prints to the Museum Collection; Musem of Modern Art, NY
1962 American Prints Today. (national)
1966 Ten Negro Artists from the United States, First World Festival of Negro Arts; Dakar, Senegal
1967 26th Annual Exhibit, Painter and Sculptors Society of New Jersey; Jersey City Museum, NJ
1970 The Black Woman; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
1972 Norma Morgan: World of Fantasy; St. Vincent College, Kennedy Gallery, Latrobe, PA (traveling)
1974 Norma Morgan: A Retrospective; Wichita Art Museum, KS
1979 The Engravings of Norma Morgan; Petrucci Gallery, Saugerties, NY
1983 A Catskill Winter; Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock, NY, (annual print award)
1986 Contemporary American Graphics (traveling)
2021 Norma Morgan: Enchanted World; Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD
2023 Norma Morgan: In the Lands of Moors and Catskills; Woodstock Artist Association & Museum, NY.
2024 Norma Morgan: In Context; Lyman Allyn Art Museum,New London, CT.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carol Mazur. “Bold Lines and Strong Colors Dominate Black Artists’ Works.” The Daily Item, 12 Nov. 1969, p. 19.
Conacher, Pamela M. “Two Worlds: Norma Morgan in Scotland & the Catskills.” Woodstock Art Colony, Woodstock Art Colony, 5 May 2023, www. learningwoodstockartcolony.com/post/two-worlds-norma-morgan-in-scotland-thecatskills.
Fax, Elton C. Seventeen Black Artists: By Elton C. Fax. Dodd, Mead, 1971.
“Morgan, Norma.” Oxford African American Studies Center, oxfordaasc. com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref-9780195301731-e38408?rskey=NGt5nK&result=1. Accessed 12 Apr. 2025.
Smith, Sandra Lewis. “Norma Morgan: A Matter of Balance.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 19, no. 1, 1985, pp. 34–35.
Weber, Bruce. “Norma Morgan: In the Lands of the Moors & Catskills.” Woodstock Art Colony, Woodstock Art Colony, 17 Aug. 2023, www.learningwoodstockartcolony.com/post/ norma-morgan-in-the-lands-of-the-moors-and-catskills.
Weyl, Christina. “The Women of Atelier 17: The Biographical Supplement.” Norma Morgan | The Women of Atelier 17, Christina Weyl, New York, 25 June 2019, atelier17.christinaweyl.com/ artist-biographies/norma-morgan/.
