UC Berkeley

Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980) has been variously celebrated as a unique voice of the southern United States, an “outsider” genius, a “black American” artist, and a quintessentially “American folk” artist of the twentieth century. We might grant these interpretative rubrics a few grains of validity: Morgan was born and raised in rural Alabama, spending her early adulthood in Columbus, Georgia before arriving in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her membership within African American Baptist and Holiness-Pentecostal churches endowed her with a religious vocabulary and expressive repertoire practiced by this worshipping community. Furthermore, her art demonstrates a preoccupation with her status as a “Bride of Christ,” replete with exuberant colors and gestural immediacy intended to induct viewers into otherworldly, biblical realms about which Morgan preached. These categories, however, sustain a rhetoric that hinges upon a boundary between an implied center that names and a hyper-visible periphery that is named. Unifying these terms are slippery questions of social identity and authenticity.

Rather than offer the final word about Morgan’s art, this dissertation argues for the very permeability of the categorical boundaries that have been employed to understand her artistic production. Throughout my account, Morgan’s life as a preacher, gospel performer, and painter is an exemplary case of modernity’s vexed and reciprocal relationship with “the folk.” First, it establishes Morgan as a creatively savvy artist who employed visual culture that was deeply informed by her Holiness-Pentecostal belief—rather than the isolated genius mainstream narratives construed her to be. Second, it argues for the central role of religion in constructing the Otherness endemic of Morgan’s reception as a producer of “heritage,” especially in the context of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festivals in the 1970s. After establishing a social and religious history for her expressive repertoire, I attribute her art’s movement within the post-WWII market to the multiple meanings audiences drew from Morgan’s painterly expressionism, visionary speech, and performances of traditional culture. Third, I narrate Morgan’s intersection with two other New Orleans artists—Noel Rockmore and Bruce Brice—to explore how these men’s social positions inflected the designation “self-taught” with divergent meanings. My study concludes with a re-consideration of the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980 exhibition that brought “black folk artists” into visibility in the 1980s. Through analyzing artworks and visual culture, sound recordings, oral history, and exhibition archives culled from collections throughout the American South, my dissertation ultimately argues that religious experience in “black folk art” was a form of visual modernity for African diasporic subjects that could dovetail with, but not be absorbed fully by, modernism’s insistence on singular authorship, visual formalism, and secular values.