OXFORD, Ohio – MidWest F.A.S.T. recently moved the “Philip Morsberger: A Retrospective,” exhibition of the artist’s works from the 1960s to the present assembled by the Morris Museum of Art to the Miami University (Ohio) Art Museum, from the artist’s studio in Augusta, Georgia. Morsberger describes his work as a continuum of “color, craft and things theological.”  Curated by Miami's curator of collections, Edna Southard, the Morsberger show and exhibition catalog include 19 of his early pieces on loan from museums throughout Ohio, including the Columbus Museum of Fine Arts, Ohio Northern University and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown.  MidWest transported the collection in a climate controlled expeditor style air ride straight truck operated by fine arts veteran driver and fine art handler Dave Weiners.

Morsberger joined the faculty of art at Miami University in 1959, where he taught until 1968. Thus began his long career as academician and artist.   In 1996 he was appointed William S. Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta State University in Ga., Emeritus since 2002. Philip Morsberger studied at Oxford University, where he was the Ruskin Master of Drawing, and has been honored by appointments at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he was the President’s Fellow in Painting from 1987 to 1996.  Morsberger’s work is in major collections on both sides of the Atlantic, including the San Jose Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,  the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, the Hood Museum in Dartmouth, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, the Miami University Art Museum in Oxford, Ohio, and the di Rosa Preserve in California. He continues to have his primary studio in Augusta, while returning regularly to Oxford, England.

This retrospective of works by Philip Morsberger presents an opportunity to survey the artist’s entire life of expression through art. The civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam and the turmoil of the 1960s had a strong influence on Morsberger’s early work. His interpretation of these events provides a visual record of the era.  His response to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 is a work painted like a film clip to evoke a feeling of action and viewer participation. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who were murdered in Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan, were memorialized in a painting, while the guilty parties were depicted in another work.  A reaction to the dark tragedies of the 1960s, this work is referred to by Morsberger as “mindscapes” or “inscapes.”

In the 1980s Morsberger continued with abstraction, sometimes with a comedic narrative that recalls his early passion for comic strips. Influences from his childhood pervade his work and seem to filter their way more prominently into his later work as autobiographical stories and reminiscences.
Morsberger continues to work in this manner, without a preliminary sketch and without any preconception about the outcome of the painting. He allows the color and the application of it to evolve into a narrative on an abstract background, with figurative elements breaking through. By thinking in Technicolor, Morsberger creatively combines his early teachings with his lifelong discoveries.  MidWest will return the exhibition to the Morris soon.  The Morris Museum of Art is the oldest and largest museum in the country that is devoted to the art and artists of the American South.

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