Bockley Gallery

About the Presentation
Bockley Gallery will present work by George Morrison in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. Bockley Gallery offers a presentation that overviews the six-decade career of George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe) (1919-2000). This presentation extends the gallery’s thirty-year relationship with Morrison, and follows his recent re-introductions to national and global audiences through the solo exhibition The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2025–2026); a United States Postal Service Forever Stamp series commemorating his works (2022); and curatorial and academic recognition for his work and influence as evidenced by publications and exhibitions too numerous to list. 

Morrison’s work spans varying scales of painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. His appreciation of ambiguity and indefinite space was expressed through spatial fragmentation and potentials of material immediacy. This took multiple, dynamic expressions from his early career in New York at the Art Students League with emergent Abstract Expressionists, to his studies and Surrealist embrace in France, to his Minnesota homecoming of reconnection and synthesis. Inspired by spiritual and phenomenological relations with skies, waters, and lands, Morrison explored their interaction most prominently  through the horizon line, which he called “evidence of a landscape.” Working from one place of significance at any given time in both urban and coastal environments, most of his works are a composite of multiple encounters with place.

Rather than adhering to linear time, the gallery’s anachronic presentation will highlight singular works to honor Morrison’s presence therein, and to allow multiple connections within and between works to arise. In the artist Kay WalkingStick’s words, “Like psychic fingerprints, the record of Morrison’s hand on the surface is best understood as a series of unrehearsed, autobiographical gestures that say, in effect, this is what it felt like to be me at that moment.” 

About the Gallery
Bockley Gallery is a contemporary art venue and curatorial practice based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since its founding in 1984, the gallery has worked with artists living and working in Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, which led to a focus with Indigenous artists across Turtle Island/North America. While the gallery offers an intimate experience through a calendar of on-site programming, its broad collaborations expand the dialogue around what it celebrates as the most relevant ideas in art today. Gallery artists’ recent highlighted institutional solo exhibitions across Turtle Island include at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hammer Museum, ICA Miami, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Hessel Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Remai Modern while recent group presentations include Sydney Biennale, SITE Santa Fe, National Portrait Gallery, Toronto Biennial of Art, Whitney Biennial, and Prospect 5 Triennial. Gallery artists are regularly honored through significant recognition including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Baloise Art Prize, Aperture Next Step Award, and many more. The gallery regularly places works in leading private and public collections such as the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of American Art, Forge Project Collection, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Singapore Art Museum. Having celebrated 40 years in 2024, Bockley Gallery recently launched a dynamic new website including an online publishing platform to center essays and voices of artists in conversation.