The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will open "The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York" on July 17, the first solo exhibition for the late Minnesota-born Ojibwe artist. The show features over 30 works by Morrison, an abstract expressionist who painted alongside Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline, and whose large wood-and-granite collages, totems, and paintings are widely installed across Minnesota and internationally. The exhibition coincides with a surge in demand for his work, driven by recent high-profile gallery shows and a 2022 USPS Forever Stamp series.
This milestone matters because it elevates a Native American artist who has long been celebrated regionally but underrecognized nationally within the canon of American abstract expressionism. The Met show, combined with the establishment of the George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts at the University of Minnesota, signals a broader institutional reckoning with Indigenous contributions to modern art. The rising market demand also reflects a growing collector interest in historically marginalized artists, potentially reshaping the art market's valuation of Native American modernists.