Summer Series: Rebecca Morris

Jul 6, 2023 12:30PM-1:30PM MST

In Conversation with Jenelle Porter

Summer Series: Featured Artists and Conversations are free and open to the public. Registration is appreciated. 

Rebecca Morris

Rebecca Morris (b. 1969 in Honolulu, Hawaii, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a painter deeply committed to abstraction, her work evolving and developing through an interrogation of materials, forms, processes, and outcomes. A showcase for her extensive arsenal of techniques and ideas, her ambitious large-scale canvases contain a personalized language of forms and compositions in differing manners of mark-making. Her work inventively explores questions of frame dynamics and figure/ground illusions, often within a remarkably shallow pictorial space. The results are enlivened by a sense of painterly improvisation and grounded by an underlying rationale – a combination that imbues the work with a feeling of the contemporary world while referring back to the very foundations of modernist abstraction.

Morris is the subject of a solo exhibition opening this September at the MCA Chicago. The show, curated by Jamillah James, is traveling from the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and looks at the past 21 years of Morris’ practice. Other significant shows include those at the Blaffer Art Museum, (2019); Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Holland (2014); The Renaissance Society, (2005) and 356 Mission Rd. and LAXART in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group shows at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2018); the Hammer Museum (2016); and the Whitney Biennial (2014). Her work is in various public collections, including The Hirshhorn Museum ; The Hammer Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art; The Cleveland Art Museum; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands; and the DePaul Art Museum.

Jenelle Porter

Jenelle Porter is a curator and writer. From 2011 to 2015 she was Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where she organized Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present and Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin, Sue Williams, as well as monographic exhibitions of the work of Jeffrey Gibson, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Dianna Molzan, Christina Ramberg, Mary Reid Kelley, Arlene Shechet, and Erin Shirreff. Her exhibitions have twice been honored by the International Association of Art Critics. Most recently, she organized Kay Sekimachi for the Berkeley Art Museum; Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design for the ICA/Boston; and Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting for the Mike Kelley Foundation at Hauser & Wirth, New York. As Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005–10), Porter organized Dance with Camera and Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay, the first museum surveys of Trisha Donnelly and Charline von Heyl, and numerous other projects. She has authored books and essays on art and artists including Kathy Butterly, Viola Frey, Jeffrey Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Jay Heikes, Margaret Kilgallen, Liz Larner, Liza Lou, Ruby Neri, Stephen Prina, and Matthew Ritchie.

Porter is curating a survey for Los Angeles performance art pioneer, Barbara T. Smith, for ICA LA, opening October 2023. Among other book projects, she recently completed An Indigenous Present with artist Jeffrey Gibson (to be released in August 2023), a 450-page compendium that presents the work of 60 Native American and Indigenous visual artists, musicians, writers, architects, historians, and more.

Summer Series: Featured Artists and Conversations are made possible by the generous support of the following sponsors:

Special thanks to the following individuals whose generosity helps to support the Summer Series programming:

• Rona and Jeff Citrin
• Eleanore and Domenico De Sole
• Sherry and Joe Felson
• Liza and Jon Mauck
• Amnon and Katie Rodan
• Reginald and Leigh Smith

In Conversation:

Rebecca Morris

Rebecca Morris (b. 1969 in Honolulu, Hawaii, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a painter deeply committed to abstraction, her work evolving and developing through an interrogation of materials, forms, processes, and outcomes. A showcase for her extensive arsenal of techniques and ideas, her ambitious large-scale canvases contain a personalized language of forms and compositions in differing manners of mark-making. Her work inventively explores questions of frame dynamics and figure/ground illusions, often within a remarkably shallow pictorial space. The results are enlivened by a sense of painterly improvisation and grounded by an underlying rationale – a combination that imbues the work with a feeling of the contemporary world while referring back to the very foundations of modernist abstraction. Morris is the subject of a solo exhibition opening this September at the MCA Chicago. The show, curated by Jamillah James, is traveling from the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and looks at the past 21 years of Morris’ practice. Other significant shows include those at the Blaffer Art Museum, (2019); Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Holland (2014); The Renaissance Society, (2005) and 356 Mission Rd. and LAXART in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group shows at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2018); the Hammer Museum (2016); and the Whitney Biennial (2014). Her work is in various public collections, including The Hirshhorn Museum ; The Hammer Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art; The Cleveland Art Museum; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands; and the DePaul Art Museum.   Portrait: Courtesy of the Rebecca Morris. Photography by Manfredi Gioacchini 

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Jenelle Porter

Jenelle Porter is a curator and writer. From 2011 to 2015 she was Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where she organized Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present and Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin, Sue Williams, as well as monographic exhibitions of the work of Jeffrey Gibson, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Dianna Molzan, Christina Ramberg, Mary Reid Kelley, Arlene Shechet, and Erin Shirreff. Her exhibitions have twice been honored by the International Association of Art Critics. Most recently, she organized Kay Sekimachi for the Berkeley Art Museum; Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design for the ICA/Boston; and Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting for the Mike Kelley Foundation at Hauser & Wirth, New York. As Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005–10), Porter organized Dance with Camera and Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay, the first museum surveys of Trisha Donnelly and Charline von Heyl, and numerous other projects. She has authored books and essays on art and artists including Kathy Butterly, Viola Frey, Jeffrey Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Jay Heikes, Margaret Kilgallen, Liz Larner, Liza Lou, Ruby Neri, Stephen Prina, and Matthew Ritchie.   Porter is curating a survey for Los Angeles performance art pioneer, Barbara T. Smith, for ICA LA, opening October 2023. Among other book projects, she recently completed An Indigenous Present with artist Jeffrey Gibson (to be released in August 2023), a 450-page compendium that presents the work of 60 Native American and Indigenous visual artists, musicians, writers, architects, historians, and more.

Learn More