When you enter Gallery 746 North at the Met in New York, the walls don’t greet you with the names you expect: Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning. Instead, you meet George Morrison – an Ojibwe artist from Chippewa City, Minnesota – and a narrative the upends who is included in the lineage of mid-20th century American art. The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York centers upwards of 25 paintings and drawing from his early New York years, alongside rare archival materials that insert Morrison into the heart of Abstract Expressionism.
Why So few Know His Story and Why it Matters
One of the striking things about The Magical City is how it forces us to reckon with gaps in the popular narrative of American Modern Art. In the conventional story, Abstract Expressionism is often part of a story of mostly white men making radical gestures in New York studios. Morrison played a vital role in defining the American Modern Art era expanding what Modernism could be. His presence reveals a missing piece we see today: that American Indian aesthetics, experiences, and philosophies were not on the periphery– they were the warp of the fabric of that era.
Morrison’s dual worlds — his Ojibwe roots on the Grand Portage Reservation and his life in mid-century New York — do not feel forced here. Instead, his paintings often gesture between urban and natural, abstraction and realistic, displacement and belonging.
Because so many art histories were (and are) written by dominant institutions, the voices and innovations of American Indian artists are frequently marginalized or omitted. This exhibition is a corrective measure, reminding us that “art history” is not fixed — it is being revised, expanded, and made more truthful.
What the Exhibition Offers
Here are some standout aspects and works from The Magical City that make it not just an art show, but an invitation to reexamine contemporary history.
- Curatorial framing & contemporaneity
Patricia Marroquin Norby (P’urhépecha), Associate Curator of Native American Art at The Met, leads the exhibition and the accompanying publication, situating Morrison’s perspective not as a sidebar but as central to rethinking the narrative of midcentury American art and the importance of American Indian artists in that era.
- Key works from Morrison’s early years
The show covers his transformation in New York in the 1940s and ’50s, when he studied at the Art Students League, befriended peers like Pollack, de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Louise Nevelson, and adopted abstraction in radical ways.
- Archival Documents
The exhibition includes exhibition announcements, photographs, letters, and other ephemera to show Morrison’s embeddedness in the artistic and social networks of Greenwich Village and beyond.
- Morrison’s Horizon Series & later landscape work
The show moves toward his “Horizon” series (where geometric abstraction meets atmospheric space) and gestures toward his later works that reconnect more explicitly to his homeland landscapes of Lake Superior.
Your Visit — What to Watch For
If you go (or even if you view from afar — links below), here are things to look out for and reflect on:
- Tension between visibility and invisibility
Long marginalized from mainstream art history, seeing Morrison’s work in such a central museum wing feels like a political act — one that challenges decades of exclusion.
- The city as muse and challenge
Morrison called NYC a “magical city” — his abstractions often treat the metropolis as textured energy, pockets of architecture, light, and movement, but always with memory and resistance beneath the surface.
- Interplay of works & archival contexts
Notice how a drawing or photograph of a painting shifts your understanding. The exhibition reveals Morrison in dialogue across time—with his own evolving vision, with his contemporaries, and with the deep pull of his heritage.
- Questioning art history
Let this exhibition provoke you: who got left out of the stories you thought you knew? What other contributions remain understudied, absented, or hidden?
Why This Show Is More Than a Retrospective
The Magical City is more than a retrospective of a single artist. It is a counter-narrative — a challenge to the dominant storytelling of American Art and Ojibwe people. It draws a new horizon where American Indian artists stand at the center of the modern era they helped create.
This show is transformative, asking us to reconsider how we teach, write, and think about “contemporary history.” It argues for a history that in inclusive and honest, one that recognizes the deep roots American Indian people have in shaping our shared visual culture.
Key People
- Patricia Marroquin Norby, Ph.D. (P’urhépecha), Assistant Curator of Native American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Kate Beane, Ph.D. (Flandreau Santee Sioux, South Dakota), Executive Director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art with Morrison art works on loan.
- Family involved:
- Briand Morrison, son of George Morrison
- Hazel Belvo, Former wife and lifetime family of George Morrison
Read more about the exhibition
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York