University of Delaware
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Keith Morrison: Middle Passage
UD Mechanical Hall Gallery through Dec. 11

Middle Passage highlights a selection of oil paintings and watercolors from the last decade by Jamaican-born artist Keith Morrison, who is a professor of art at Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Morrison's work engages local, global and Caribbean diasporic concerns. A recent suite of paintings, forcefully evocative yet reductive in form, give the exhibition its title.

At once a reference to the cross-Atlantic passage that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas in an elaborate trade route — Europe, Africa, the Americas — the significance of Middle Passage is redoubled in the context of Morrison's paintings that favor an iconography of cultural mélange. Settled and unsettled territories, unseen tragedy implied by trauma, and verdant and enigmatic groves and waterways permeate the work of the artist. Deeply mythical and often political, Morrison's exquisite paintings offer sensory delight and compositional shrewdness.

painting
Keith Morrison, Slow Boat, 2003. Watercolor, 40 x 30 in. © Keith Morrison
Photography by Richard Paradowski