Ree Morton
1936–1977

During a prolific career that ended prematurely in a fatal car accident, Ree Morton produced a significant body of work that adds complexity to Postminimal art of the 1970s. Her deeply personal sculpture and installations played with space, language, decoration, feminine tropes, metaphor, and color. Morton began her art studies in 1966, after training to be a nurse, marrying a naval officer, and becoming a mother to three children. She received a BFA in 1968 from the University of Rhode Island and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 1970. Emboldened by the growing feminist movement, she explored the possibilities of what she termed a “female sensibility,” both embracing and skewering the trappings of conventional womanhood. The imagery, palette, and objects in Signs of Love, perhaps her most significant work, are unapologetically sentimental and lighthearted. The work’s decorative ribbons, garlands, and banners—key motifs in her art—were crafted from Celastic, a plastic material that becomes pliable like fabric for a brief period when wet but hardens upon drying. Although the work reflects the influence of artists such as Florine Stettheimer, Claes Oldenburg, and Eva Hesse, it also retains a distinctive originality through its free-association involving form, poetry, and symbolism. Morton once said, “A work of art has a unique quality . . . of clarifying and concentrating meaning contained in scattered and weakened ways the material of other experience.” Signs of Love was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1977, the year of Morton’s death.