Ree Morton

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

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.