Sister Gertrude Morgan

Sister Gertrude Morgan was an African American outsider artist, preacher, and musician born on April 7, 1900, in LaFayette, Alabama. Deeply rooted in her Pentecostal Christian faith, Morgan believed she received a divine calling in the 1930s that set her on a path of evangelical street preaching, singing, and eventually visual art-making. She relocated to New Orleans in 1939, where she co-founded a mission and orphanage in the Gentilly neighborhood. Her art emerged as a direct extension of her religious mission, she used paintings, drawings, and illustrated poems to spread the Gospel and communicate prophetic visions she believed were sent from God. Morgan's visual style is a hallmark of American outsider and folk art traditions. Working primarily on cardboard, paper fans, Styrofoam cups, and other humble supports, she rendered vivid biblical scenes, the New Jerusalem, and her own spiritual autobiography using house paint, tempera, and pen. Her compositions are densely packed with text and image, often including verses from Revelation, and she frequently depicted herself as the Bride of Christ, dressed entirely in white, a practice she adopted after a divine instruction she received in 1956. Her most celebrated work, "New Jerusalem," exemplifies her apocalyptic vision, rendered in bold, flat color with an almost architectural sense of divine order. Sister Gertrude Morgan gained significant recognition during her lifetime, particularly after her work was championed by collectors and curators in the late 1960s and 1970s. She was featured in the landmark 1970 exhibition "Two Hundred Years of North American Indian Art" and more prominently in surveys of self-taught and visionary art. Her work entered major collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the American Folk Art Museum in New York. She is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in American folk and outsider art, celebrated for her fierce spiritual conviction, her unique pictorial language, and her unwavering sense of divine purpose.