Keith Anthony Morrison

Remembering Keith Anthony Morrison (1942-2026)

Keith Anthony Morrison, a distinguished artist, curator, scholar and arts educator, was born in Linstead, Jamaica in 1942. He attended Calabar High School, and on graduation traveled to the United States in 1959 to further his studies in fine arts, earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts (1963) and Master of Fine Arts (1965) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His artistic and curatorial work garnered international attention and esteem. While he forged his professional career primarily outside the Caribbean nation, the Jamaican Order of Distinction, Commander Class (CD) was conferred on Morrison in 2017 to honor his outstanding contributions to the arts. A printmaker, painter, curator, and art critic, Morrison leaves behind a distinguished creative and intellectual oeuvre, one destined to instruct and delight generations to come. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the National Gallery of Art; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art, Monterrey, Mexico; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland.

Best known for his figurative paintings and watercolors, Morrison represented Jamaica at the 1994 Caribbean Biennial in Santo Domingo, and in 2001 his work was included in the Venice Biennale, a prestigious international platform. This was the first Venice Biennale for the artist and for the Caribbean nation; the Jamaican pavilion was overseen by Margaret Bernal, spouse of Dr. Richard Bernal, who served as the Jamaican ambassador to the U.S. Morrison’s submissions to the biennale—watercolors, such as Shango’s Cargo, Path of the Samba, and In Search of El Dorado—exemplified the artist’s symbolic range, one influenced by Jamaica but equally his travels in Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippines.

Engaging personal, local, and global concerns, Morrison’s visual language includes a vernacular vocabulary that is quintessentially diasporic, if not nomadic. His pictorial and iconographic clues connect but do not bind his work to a Black or Caribbean diaspora. Responsive to past and present histories, influenced by music, literature, history, and his physical environs, Morrison once described his process as “more intuitive than intellectualized.” Yet Morrison was intellectual and philosophical as well as witty. Deeply mythical and occasionally ironic, Morrison’s exquisite paintings offer both sensual delight and compositional shrewdness. Settled and unsettled territories, unseen tragedy, implied trauma, verdant and enigmatic groves and waterways proliferate his work. As Franklin W. Knight wrote for the Jamaica Observer in 2011, “People, plants and animals commingle in ironic and comedic situations. There are so many levels of understanding that the art becomes a sort of X-ray of the artist’s impressively vast erudition. Although much of Morrison’s art is autobiographical, it includes astute political commentary and reflections on his travels, his observations, his reading and musical tastes.” Further, noted Knight, “Apart from his skillful use of colour, what sets Morrison’s art apart is the consummate skill with which he manages to conflate religious and secular, real and imaginary, or the triumphant and the trivial.”

Most recently Professor of Painting Emeritus at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, Morrison had a distinguished career in academia as administrator and professor. He was the first African American to be appointed the academic dean of art in a predominantly white American university, a position he held at five institutions, including Tyler School of Art. Morrison served as chairperson of the art department at DePaul University, associate dean of the College of Architecture and Art at the University of Illinois in Chicago, chairperson of the art department of the University of Maryland at College Park, dean of academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute, dean of the College of Creative Arts at San Francisco State University, and dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Independent from his academic administration, Morrison was a forceful advocate for non-profit arts organizations in each of the cities he called home, for which he willingly took on governance and curatorial responsibilities. Among these are the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington D.C. and the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, PA.

Morrison’s early education included formative studies at Calabar High School in Kingston and drawing classes at the Jamaica School of Arts and Crafts founded in 1950 by the renowned sculptress, Edna Manley and the only degree-granting visual and performing arts institution in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Morrison was both an insider and an outsider in the Black American arts arena. In the mid-1960s he met James A. Porter and David C. Driskell, disciplinary giants in the field, which led to his first university teaching appointment at Fisk University in Nashville, TN. Morrison’s advocacy for a Pan-African art criticism, shaped by lived experiences and an individual perspective on Black and colonial histories, diverged significantly from that of Porter and Driskell. “As critic and scholar, Morrison is the most articulate spokesman to come to the discipline in the last decade. His enlightened body of writing focuses on the heritable sensibilities of Black artists, without referring to their work as an appendage of white culture,” noted Driskell.

Morrison’s singular voice is evident in his written work. While his notable contributions to books, periodicals, newspapers, and museum catalogues stand apart from his artistic oeuvre and administrative work, they point to Morrison’s formidable and multidisciplinary fluency.

An astute art critic and eloquent writer, Morrison honed his insightful commentary and contemporary arts criticism for the New Art Examiner, an arts journal founded in Chicago in 1973. He contributed exhibition reviews, artist interviews and cogent observations that addressed the dearth of in-depth understanding and writing on art by Black artists in the US. “The problem is that there continues to be no consistent publication of art criticism in major art journals written by Black critics, interested in art from a Black person’s perspective,” wrote Morrison in 1978. Morrison’s New Art Examiner article, “Art Criticism: A Pan-African Point of View,” and others to follow, drove home an essential fact that few risked voicing publicly at that time. “Because of the assumed absence of a Black art character, most critics have felt free to judge Black artists, according to the traditions of American-European art criticism.” Morrison leveraged sharp and witty analogies—ones that demonstrated his own intellectual underpinnings—to advance his points. In “Questioning the Quality Canon”, New Art Examiner, October 1990, he equated the custodians of culture to the gods of Teutonic mythology living in a legendary palace, Valhalla: “…the Gods of the art world Valhalla are Eurocentric zealots who continue a long held intellectual prejudice: that ideas about art only emerge from the discourse of white people….” Undeterred by some of the systemic failures in the profession he chose, Morrison challenged their foundational myths and structures through his writing, curatorial work, arts education, and administration.

Morrison’s writing drew from a deep well of source knowledge that was at once encyclopedic and then again liberated from conventional ways of seeing and thinking. As his friend, the late philosopher Richard P. McKeon would say, “any problem, pushed to its extreme, becomes a philosophical problem.” Morrison and McKeon both shared a passion for Aristotle—yet Morrison’s art and his writing were more than philosophical musings.

An internationally minded curator, Morrison was laser-focused on showcasing artists with integrity. Sharpened by his own practice of writing exhibition reviews, his curatorial work reflected his vision to advance an understanding of art, without distorting its relationship to cultural values. Morrison’s curatorial projects were reflective and responsive to the needs of the artistic community, here in the U.S. and abroad. Important exhibitions include Art in Washington and its Afro-American Presence: 1940-1970 held at the Washington Project for the Arts in 1985; The Curator’s Eye III, for the National Gallery of Art in Kingston, Jamaica, 2008; Metaphor/Commentaries: Artists from Cuba for the San Francisco State University Art Gallery, in 1999; and Caribbean Transitions for the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, D.C. in 2022. “Curated by one of the most significant Caribbean artists and art curators of our time,” wrote art historian and scholar Anna Arabindan-Kesson, “and beginning from the unique vantage point of looking from the Caribbean to the rest of the world, it is an exhibition that promises to challenge and disrupt these definitions by emphasizing the hemispheric connections, cultures, and movements that constitute the multiplicity of experiences that have always defined, and perhaps exceeded, the limits of the Americas.” As Arabindan Kesson noted the exhibition catalogue, Caribbean Transitions began with a question, “What does it mean to think hemispherically?”—and answered it, “by situating the Caribbean as the historic fulcrum of the culture of the Americas.”

Caribbean Transitions followed the Katzen Arts Center’s 2019 exhibition Passages: Keith Morrison, 1999-2019 curated by Judith Stein and focused on the artist’s polyphonic figurative paintings and watercolors. Morrison’s capacious “view reorientation,” one that acknowledges and de-emphasizes North America, aptly defines the artist’s painterly proclivities. As Driskell remarked, “Morrison deliberately fools the eye into accepting his own formula of meaningful spatial relationships….” Morrison’s view reorientation is a throughline: traversing his entry from Jamaica in 1959 to a U.S. art world that emphasized post-WWII abstraction yet expected “identity-based” art by Black artists, to his well-earned American university emeritus status. Morrison’s education in Chicago extended far beyond the art classroom—he likened the racial and cultural chasm he experienced there to that of two countries. Morrison’s position as insider outsider was more than felicitous, and his impact on the field—for artists, students, and scholars alike—is immeasurable. In addition to the important 2004 biography by scholar Renée Ater, writings by and about Keith Morrison are readily discoverable. One of the most comprehensive sources is the website: keithmorrison.com.

Keith Anthony Morrison carried his significant gifts and accomplishments quietly, yet there are many who will proclaim them loudly. Hear them oh you Gods of the art world Valhalla. 

Keith Morrison passed peacefully with family at his side on June 1, 2026. He is predeceased by his daughter, Dr. Melinda Gibson. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Susan C. Alunan, son, Ron Morrison (Rana), brother, Colin Morrison, stepchildren Catherine Alunan Talton (David Hassett, Theo and Luca), Robert Alunan Talton (Savannah), Buddy Gibson and a large and loving extended family. A memorial is pending.

—Julie L. McGee, Ph.D.

—Franklin W. Knight, Ph.D.

Encomia: