Image

Ree Morton

Untitled (Signs of Love), 1976

Now On View

Description

Maker

Title

Untitled (Signs of Love)

Year

1976

Medium

Oil on plywood with celastic curtain

Materials/Techniques

Materials

Dimensions

120.6 x 146 x 14 cm (47 x 57 1/2 x 5 inches) irregular

Type

Credit

Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund

Object Number

2005.3

Exhibition History

Exhibition History

The Phantom of Liberty

May 4 - December 30, 2018

I was a housewife, right? I was a mother, I had children, I had a family to take care of. And [being an artist] was something I did in my extra time. The teachers would talk a lot about commitment, being committed to your work, and somehow that word had a lot of implications that I couldn’t accept, the kind of lifestyle that I didn’t think I wanted; that somehow if you are an artist you have to behave a certain way, you had a certain way of looking at the world that I didn’t think had anything to do with me, so I would just never be committed, I would never say that I was an artist. I would say that I did paintings, that I was a housewife, and that this was where my interest was. And I was going to school. I would call myself a student, but it was a long time before I would say I was an artist. –Ree Morton

Everyday Things

April 13, 2012 - February 24, 2013

In the late 1960s Ree Morton abandoned her middle-class life as a wife, mother, and nurse to become an artist. An early proponent of installation art, she experimented with nontraditional materials and integrated elements of painting and sculpture with the work’s site. Untitled (Signs of Love) is composed of a pastel-toned landscape painting and a patterned curtain made of Celastic, a material used for set designs. The painting presents a romantic, nostalgic fantasy in the literally “rosy” view out the window while the three-dimensional curtain suggests the tangible reality of daily life. With its swags, floral motifs, and pastel palette, the painting further embodies ideas about decoration, domesticity, sentimentality, and theatricality—characteristics traditionally associated with the feminine and not typically considered appropriate for serious art.

Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in Copyright. This object is Untitled (Signs of Love) with the accession number of 2005.3. To request a higher resolution file, please submit an online request.