Folk Art in the South: Selections from the Permanent Collection
Folk art—often characterized as outsider, visionary, or self-taught—varies widely in medium and subject matter. The range of descriptive terms applied to it does little to describe the imaginative ways in which folk artists express deeply personal ideas in visual language. They employ readily accessible materials, including found objects, to produce their work, putting mundane materials to fresh and ingenious uses.…
The Eugene Fleischer Collection of Studio Art Glass
The history of the studio art glass movement in America is relatively brief. Its origins can be pinpointed precisely to two workshops conducted by ceramist Harvey Littleton, who was interested in the potential of glass as an artistic medium, and chemist and engineer Dominick Labino held at the Toldeo Museum of Art in 1962. Littleton had envisioned a more or…
Water Works: Recent Paintings by Lillie Morris
Lillie Morris, a native of Augusta, is well known for her acrylic paintings, collages, and mixed-media works. She specializes in abstract art that reveals a love of texture and color and an instinct for experimentation. Her work is richly layered, and she employs a vocabulary of gestural marks and linear elements that is uniquely hers in an attempt to convey…
Messages from Home: The Art of Leo Twiggs
Now eighty-six, Dr. Leo Twiggs, regarded for many years as one of South Carolina’s most important artists, is a native of Saint Stephen, a small town north of Charleston. The first member of his family to attend college, he matriculated at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where he majored in art, English, and history. After earning his undergraduate degree…
Will Henry Stevens
An American original, Will Henry Stevens (1881–1949) was a modernist painter and naturalist who was as inspired by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman as he was by the work of the American painters John Henry Twachtman and James Abbott McNeill Whistler and the Chinese painters of the Song dynasty. Stevens was a…
Jonathan Green: Selections from the Permanent Collection
Born and raised in the South Carolina low country, Jonathan Green graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1982 and has sustained a very successful career ever since. His paintings can be found in major museum, corporate, and private collections around the world. He is represented in the Morris Museum’s permanent collection by nearly forty works…