It’s probably for the best that Robert Morrison worked in the art department rather than the accounting department.
Not that there was anything wrong with his math skills; the University of Nevada, Reno, art professor, who taught at UNR from 1968-2017 and died in 2018, was not one for tidy answers. The stories his former students and colleagues tell suggest that his approach to life and art was one of rigor, curiosity and relentless, meandering inquiry.
A selection of Morrison’s work is on display at Western Nevada College in Carson City, in a show titled A Glimpse Back. It contains, among other works, steel and bronze abstractions, from around baseball-mitt size to appliance size. Titles like “Nurse” and “Baboon Nurse” seem to allude to specific stories—but you won’t find human or animal shapes, even if you squint. Most of Morrison’s shapes are so nonrepresentational that they force your focus onto the materials and surfaces. It’s easy to drop the question of “what it all means” and proceed to fawning over the weights and shapes of each piece, the copper, the gold and rust-colored patinas, and the rich textures he coaxed from bronze and steel.
Among the show’s many mysteries, a row of five tall, steel panels with notches and thin lines cut into them look like they could be objects salvaged from an industrial site. They’re not; they’re titled “Mumbles.” Sharon Rosse, director of Capital City Arts Initiative, the group that organized the exhibition, said that, as of 1983, when Morrison fabricated them, the title was accurate. Each “Mumble” has a small motor at the top, and they used to make sounds.
“It was just sort of a mumble,” Rosse said. “His sound was always like just scratching on a window screen. It was never talking, or anything recognizable.”
In the current exhibition, the sculptures make no sound. “We have no idea how to reproduce it,” Rosse said. “He didn’t leave instructions.”
You’d be excused for wondering if presenting the “Mumbles” without their sound might have been a curatorial copout, but it’s more of a fitting demonstration of one of Morrison’s most important points.
Brett Van Hoesen, a UNR art history professor, wrote, in an essay accompanying the show, “What I find most admirable about Morrison as an artist and colleague was his willingness to live with the uncomfortability of the unsolved.”
Van Hoesen elaborated in a phone interview: “He’d be like, ‘Yeah, my printer’s not working, but it’s making these really interesting lines. … What could I do with that in the meantime while I’m waiting for my new printer?’ He would be willing to be in that liminal space. I really admired that.”
Said Tamara Scronce, a former art department professor and Morrison’s student in the late 1980s: “There’s never this equation of one plus one equals two; it’s always like one plus one equals seven or something like that.”
Morrison left a couple of generations of students calling him an unparalleled mentor. By all accounts, he was not one to coddle.
“He was an amazing teacher,” said Rosse, who studied with Morrison in the 1970s. “Always the blasted cigarettes and a cup of coffee with a lid on it from the AM/PM or 7-Eleven or something. … During critiques, of course, you had to know what you were talking about.”
Said Scronce: “He took you seriously. He was asking you to consider your own work more expansively than you and your colleagues already were. … He could take a pretty poorly done drawing and talk to you about how to refine the skills within that drawing, but more importantly, how to care about why you were drawing what you were drawing.”
She described art-school critiques as a situation in which students can easily feel uncomfortably vulnerable, putting a work that contains their heart and soul up for critical discussion.
“Sometimes that would feel like getting beat up a bit,” Scronce said of Morrison’s critiques.
She remembers feeling deflated after some of those discussions. “He wouldn’t hold back,” she said. “If we’re going to use the analogy of getting knocked down, he wasn’t going to rush in and pick you up and brush you off. He was going to let you roll around in the dirt a little bit. But he wouldn’t leave you there.”
He would never shut a student down, Rosse recalled.
“He was always putting your work, amazingly, in context with a greater contemporary art scene,” Rosse said. “So everybody felt like, ‘Well, we can do this. We can be professional artists.’ … I remember seeing people go off with high expectations to other schools around the country.”
Each time she bid farewell to a grad-school-bound classmate, she’d wonder if they would ever run into teachers as good as Morrison.
The Capital City Arts Initiative presents A Glimpse Back, showcasing a selection of works by Robert Morrison, in the Bristlecone Gallery at Western Nevada College, 2201 West College Parkway, in Carson City, through Wednesday, Dec. 11. Learn more at www.ccainv.org/morrison-glimpse-back.
I met Robert not through art but racing sports cars. He was an avid collector and racer of Porsche’s, of which he had many, as well as an Audi or two. It was only years into knowing him that I learned he was an artist. He was a delightful human with a quick wit and a smile. I was fortunate to see his work at the Nevada Museum of art where the use of sound was incorporated into most all of the pieces displayed. Clearly a remarkable person. We miss him.