February 3, 2025
Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago
An OPC talk with artist Nyeema Morgan.
Nyeema Morgan is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is a question-based study of dominant cultural narratives and how they empower and marginalize identities. Morgan critically examines aesthetic registers of different materials, mediums and forms that result in a range of works from large scale drawings to mixed media sculptures and print based media. They draw upon cultural artifacts as source material such as internet message boards, books, recipes, fables, canonical art works, and jokes. These familiar things are entry points that allow her to question how such kinds of material have become the tools of world-making—a convenient and acceptable story we write to tell ourselves about ourselves—about who we are, how we recognize one another, and the world as it is. In particular, Morgan’s work explores how these types of seemingly benign cultural artifacts contain soft power as they are the mediums through which we fabricate and perpetuate our beliefs about life.
Morgan's works have been presented in exhibitions at The Drawing Center, NYC, NY; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; PATRON, Chicago, IL; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC, NY and more. She earned an MFA from the California College of the Arts and a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art. Her work is held in public collections at the Walker Art Center, The Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Worcester Museum of Art.