Nyeema Morgan facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Nyeema Morgan
Born	1977 (age 47–48) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Alma mater	Cooper Union School of Art (BFA) California College of the Arts (MFA)
Known for	Conceptual art, installation art
Notable work	Like It Is: Those Extraordinary Twins yawar mallku (sculpting elsewhere in time / the arc of the moral universe is long… / the Lesson, pt. 2)

Nyeema Morgan (born 1977) is an American artist. She creates art using many different types of materials and ideas. Her work often explores how we understand things in a complicated world. She uses drawing, sculpture, and printmaking in her art.

Nyeema Morgan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She studied art at the Cooper Union School of Art and the California College of the Arts. She has also been an artist-in-residence at places like the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her artworks are kept in important collections, such as the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Early Life and Art Education

Nyeema Morgan was born in 1977 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Arlene Burke-Morgan and Clarence Morgan, were also artists. She grew up in Greenville, North Carolina. Later, she went to South High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

When she was young, other artists like Rafala Green and Seitu Jones helped guide her. She was one of 17 young artists chosen for a special project. They helped recreate a mural by John T. Biggers on a sound barrier in Minnesota.

Morgan went to The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in 2000. She then earned her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in 2007 from the California College of the Arts. In 2009, she was an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. This means she lived and worked there for a period.

Nyeema Morgan's Art Career

Nyeema Morgan is known for her mixed media and installation art. Mixed media means she uses many different materials in one artwork. Installation art means she creates art that takes up a whole space or room. Her art often includes text, sculptures, and drawings. She explores how we make sense of things in our complex world. She has said her work looks at how we gain knowledge from everyday objects.

As of 2021, Morgan has had nine solo or two-person art shows. She has also been an artist-in-residence at places like Smack Mellon.

Some of her solo and two-person exhibitions include:

• THE STEM. THE FLOWER. THE ROOT. THE SEED. at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.
• Asians Smaisians and Other Racial Slurs with artist Mike Cloud. This show was at the Marlborough Contemporary Gallery in New York.
• horror horror at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine.
• I, Rhinoceros at the Staniar Gallery at Washington and Lee University.

Her art has also been shown in many group exhibitions. These include shows at The Drawing Center and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She has also shown work at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Morgan has taken part in several artist residency programs. These include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Program in 2013. She was also at Smack Mellon in 2015. She has received important grants, like the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant. Morgan has also given talks about her art at many universities.

In 2013, Morgan was part of an exhibition called The Shadows Took Shape. This show was at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It focused on Afrofuturism. This is a cultural movement that combines African culture with science fiction. For this show, she helped create a small wooden spacecraft. It looked like the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. This artwork is now part of the Menil Collection.

Notable Artworks and Exhibitions

Nyeema Morgan creates art that makes you think. Here are some examples of her interesting works.

Forty-Seven Easy Poundcakes Like grandma Use To Make

This artwork started in 2007. Morgan was inspired after eating a Starbucks pound cake. It didn't taste as good as her grandmother's. This made her think about what makes a pound cake "authentic." She searched online and found 46 different "easy pound cake" recipes.

Her artwork is a series of 47 digital drawings. Each drawing is based on one of these recipes. She changed each recipe to match her grandmother's. She would cross out words or layer them. This made the drawings look like "Etch-a-Sketch-like patterns." A reviewer from the Wall Street Journal described them this way.

The series was first shown in 2012 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In 2013, a solo exhibition of this series opened in Brooklyn. For this show, volunteers baked 47 real pound cakes. Each cake was made from a different recipe in the series.

Like It Is: Those Extraordinary Twins

This artwork was part of an exhibition in 2018. The show was called Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art. It was at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Morgan's piece, created in 2016, is a graphite drawing.

It shows a scanned image of a title page from a book. The book is The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins by Mark Twain. Morgan cropped the image to only show the words "those extraordinary twins." The left side of the drawing shows a double outline. It looks like the artist working. You can also see text from the next page showing through. This artwork is now in the permanent collection of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

THE STEM. THE FLOWER. THE ROOT. THE SEED.

In 2020, Morgan had a solo exhibition with this title. It was at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. This show was part of the museum's events celebrating 100 years of women's suffrage. Women's suffrage is the right for women to vote.

The exhibition included several works:

• THE STEM. THE FLOWER. THE ROOT. THE SEED. This was an installation with printed materials. Visitors could take a piece called The Flower, No. 4 from the exhibit.
• The Flower, No. 3. This was white vinyl text placed around the gallery. It hinted at stories about women's lives, both real and fictional.
• Soft. Power. Hard Margins. This was a group of seven sculptures. They explored how historical artworks by women artists are seen. These pieces combined images with cutout letters. They were set in fancy shadowboxes.

The curator, Rose van Mierlo, said Morgan's art is "brilliant." She said it helps us understand how myths are created in culture and history. At the same time, it tells its own stories.

Personal Life

Nyeema Morgan lives in Chicago. She is married to artist Mike Cloud. They have two children together.