Robert Morris Biography
Robert Morris (1931 - 2018), born in Kansas City, MO, initially studied engineering before turning to art and art criticism. In 1966, he earned an MA from Hunter College in New York City, NY, after writing a thesis on Constantin Brancusi. While living in San Francisco, California, in the 1950s, Morris developed an interest in dance, partly due to the influence of his wife, Simone Forti, a dancer and choreographer. In 1959, Morris moved to New York, where he continued to choreograph experimental dance pieces for the Judson Dance Theatre. During the 1960s and 1970s, Morris contributed significantly to the emergence of several art movements, including Minimalism, Process Art, and Earthworks. Morris's early minimalist forms were constructed as props to accompany dance performances and, through their simple structure, expressed the Judson group's accentuation of the relationship between form and function. In the late 1960s, Morris began using more industrial materials, such as aluminum and steel, for sculptural works, and became a leading proponent of Process Art through his use of moldable materials such as felt, rope, mirrors, and earth to create ephemeral works of art. His works have been exhibited in numerous venues, including the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Also an accomplished writer and theorist, he wrote a seminal essay outlining the foundations of Minimalism titled Notes on Sculpture, first published in Artforum in 1966. Morris has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970 and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1994. The artist died in November 2018 in New York state.
