Nyeema Morgan's practice fascinates for her graceful deconstructions—interplays of historical excerpts to be analyzed, quizzically comedic set ups for jokes, and a powerful undercurrent of eroticism rushing in waves beneath the libraries, the annals of art history, and the broader cultural touchstones to which she alludes. Oftentimes we find her entangled with the lifespan of print as a tool in the production and distribution of knowledge; of course, latent crises of literacy, access, curiosity, and desire hover, spectral, just beyond the frames of her undoings.
Over the years I've known Morgan's work, she has frequently reintroduced hand, gesture, and drawing back into the somersault of equations by which shared knowledges are made active. she becomes an elegant and perverse anachronism—a recurrence of the scribes who preceded printing presses. more recently, baroque and rococo ornamentation has swanned through Morgan's syntaxes, and as ornament has always done, the material here and now is further established while some passing cloud bit of heaven also finds itself in allusion in the curling motifs.
Morgan's work... forms its address in counterposition to the systemic ways that womanhood, Black womanhood particularly, has been forced toward a site of impossibility within American culture and more broadly white supremacy Eurocentric ideological systems. historically denied access to education and cooperative systems of thought, while also contesting agency, awareness, capacities of pleasure and rage, within her body, women, especially women of color, have been made to struggle against a double bind that banishes them from both mind and body. It is out of those struggles around negation that Morgan recycles text and constructs tenuously collaged conditions that cut across mind-body ontologies. up to this point in her oeuvre, a measured, controlled reorganization of global cultural inheritances orient toward inevitable rupture, breach, climax.
Biography
Morgan's work has been included in exhibitions at The Drawing Center, NY; Marlborough Contemporary, NY; Grant Wahlquist Gallery, ME; PATRON, Chicago, IL; Art in General, NY; The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Paris, France; and the CSS Bard Galleries/ Bard College, NY. Morgan's awards and residencies include a Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant, NY; an Art Matters Grant, NY; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace residency, NY and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, ME. Morgan earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from Cooper Union School of Art.
Mike Cloud & Nyeema Morgan: Story Structure, Pt. 2. Neubauer Collegium, Chicago, IL, 2026
take my wife…PLEASE!. PATRON, Chicago, IL, 2026
between friends (with Mary Simpson), David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, 2022
The Set-up, Patron Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2022
Soft Power. Hard Margins., Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Portland, ME, 2022
Nyeema Morgan, The Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, 2021
Soft Power. Hard Margins., table, Chicago, IL, 2021
THE STEM. THE FLOWER. THE ROOT. THE SEED., Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO, 2020
Asians Smaisians and Other Abstract Racial Slurs (with Mike Cloud), Marlborough Contemporary/Viewing Room, New York, NY, 2019
horror horror, Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Portland, ME, 2018
I, Rhinoceros, Washington & Lee University, Lexington, VA, 2016
The Dubious Sum of Vaguely Discernable Parts, The Bindery Projects, Minneapolis, MN, 2012
You Are Here. This Is Now., Art in General/ Musée Miniscule, New York, NY, 2011
Like It Is, John Jay College Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice/ CUNY, New York, NY, 2010
Group
Objects & Power, ICA Maine College of Art & Design, Portland, ME, 2024
Errata, PATRON, Chicago, IL, 2024
There is a Woman in Every Color, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, 2021 (Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE, 2024; Mulvane Art Museum, Topeka, KS, 2023; El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX, 2023; Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN, 2022)
The Scripts Found in a Bottle, Found in a Can, Found in a Discourse (Les Scripts Trouvés dans une Bouteille, Trouvés dan une Canette, Trouvés dans un Discours), The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI, 2022
Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity, Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA, 2022
Museum of Capitalism, Kellen Gallery/ Parsons School of Design, New York, NY, 2019
Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, 2018
Itasca, The Bindery Projects, St. Paul, MN, 2016
Signal from Noise, CSS Bard Galleries/ Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2015
The Intuitionists, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, 2014
The Shadows Took Shape, in collaboration with william cordova & Otebenga Jones & Associates, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, 2014
Projet Gutenberg, Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Paris, France, 2012
The Festival of Nearly Invisible Publishing, VerySmallKitchen & Pigeon Wing Gallery, London, UK, 2010
Benoît Blanchard, “Gutenberg Project: Galerie JeanRoch Dard,” oeuvres revue. February 2, 2012.
Interviews
“An Oral History with Nyeema Morgan by Nate Young,” Bomb Magazine. July 22, 2022.
“Nyeema Morgan by Norm Paris,” Bomb Magazine. January 5, 2021.
Publications
Morgan, Nyeema. "Love Rituals", A Tender Spirit, A Vital Form. edited by Howard Oransky, University of Minnesota Press, 2022, pp. 69-76. View excerpt