Jamaica-born artist Garfield Morgan making lasting impressions in Canada

IN 2018, Garfield Morgan left behind an enviable reputation in Jamaica when he migrated to Montreal, Canada, where he has since been making quite an impression on that North American country’s art scene.

Among other accomplishments, he was featured as the Artist of the Month for June 2022 on the Artists In Montreal website. In January last year, a book titled Patchwork: Essays and Interviews on Caribbean Visual Culture, by Jacqueline Bishop, was published and included an interview with Morgan about his tarpaulin work in Jamaica, which The Gleaner, too, featured on Friday, April 1, 2016, under the headline, ‘Conversation through tar on tarpaulin – The persistence of memory’.

In July of that 2023, Morgan’s work, titled Consumer Bird, which was exhibited at the Beijing Biennale in China in 2010, was included in the international Climate Art Collection. He relocated to his home to Edmonton in 2023 and is the 2023-24 artist-in-residence at Harcourt House Artist Run Centre.

As one of his latest artistic achievements, Morgan’s artworks are on display at the Don Wheaton Family YMCA at 10211 102 Avenue, N W Edmonton, and will continue to be until October 31. That exhibition, ‘What Lies Beneath’, was also a part of The Works Art and Design Festival, which is the largest open-air free festival in North America.

In an interview for that said festival, he said, “I work mostly with recycled material. Previously, I worked a lot with acrylic, but these days I’ve learned to paint in oil, and I’m rather enjoying that, so I’m now combining found material, used fabric, used materials, generally along with oil paints, and I’m having fun doing that.”

In describing what he has done with What Lies Beneath, Morgan explained, “I’ve used fabric, for the most part, as an underlay for the oil painting that I’ve done on top. And it’s mostly about people, black people; and it’s partly to disrupt the negative stereotypes and the narratives that ensued most times in media about black people, and really to see the innate value in people. So it’s not just to look at people because of their skin tone, but to look deeper, because we all are good people beneath, however we appear on top.”

When Morgan was asked about how he wanted patrons to react to this work, he said lightheartedly, “As long as they don’t ignore the work, I’m fine … . However the response, I’m fine with it. As long as the work is not ignored. That’s basically my thing; just don’t ignore the work. Either be turned off or be turned on; be stimulated, or not be stimulated … . As long as you don’t ignore it, I’m fine.”

The ‘media sheet’ for the YMCA show says, inter alia, “Garfield is a complex visual artist hewed in the urban trenches of Kingston just about the time when Jamaica was deemed to have ignited in an abyss of political tribalism, violence and bloodshed from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.”

“Witnessing the struggles in the society, expressed by icons such as Bob Marley, Garfield devised a way to reconcile his urban folk reality with a first-class British colonial education that saw him develop a love for art and literature. He has amassed more than thirty years of professional experience and has charted a way of weaving his life survey and testimony as multi-disciplinary art and installation.”

In his artist statement he says, “My acrylic paintings, mixed-media collages, installations and reconstructions are a continuous cycle of reflection on man, his engagement with other human beings and his relationship with his environment. I incorporate non-traditional, discarded materials and objects as metaphor for the marginalised, racialised, oppressed peoples and cultures that I seek to resurrect from destruction and near invisibility to re-engage now as art.

“I embrace the AfriCOBRA aesthetic to ‘empower’ people, see their innate value and to always portray them in a positive light. The re-use of castaway items and my other recycling efforts are attempts to tread lightly, thereby reducing my carbon footprint on the planet and also to create beauty from what might be regarded as waste.”

At the end of his residency at Harcourt House Artist Run Centre, Morgan’s solo show at the said place will open on the 18th of October on the third floor. “I have not yet decided finally what the title of my Harcourt House show will be. I was promoting it as ‘Too Clothed for Comfort’, but this may change,” Morgan shared with The Gleaner.

“I’m really looking forward to that. I’m working towards that feverishly … I don’t want to give away too much of it, but it involves me working with the closet which has become a crime scene,” he says in the interview for The Works Art and Design Festival.

Garfield Morgan is a full-time visual artist who had completed an MFA in painting at the Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, where he was awarded the postgraduate fellowship in the School of Art.