Donald Morgan:

Tomorrow was Yesterday

On View: March 15th - April 26th, 2025
Artist Reception: March 15th, 2025, 1-5pm

Donald Morgan, The Incomplete Short Stories, 2024, graphite on paper. 7 x 5.5 inches

SE Cooper Contemporary is honored to present a solo exhibition of new works by Donald Morgan. The exhibition will be on view from March 15th through April 26th, 2025, with an artist reception on March 15th from 1-5pm.

Tomorrow was Yesterday includes recent drawings and a sculpture that create a visual language of corroborating evidence, pulled from the overflowing storage locker of information that lives behind our eyes. Morgan often starts drawings by tracing the outlines of the cover of a paperback book, providing a familiar form to anchor  viewers. Tools, shapes and signs, known to the artist, accumulate like notes or a tune in an improvisational context. They are then let loose on the page, like giving over to the impulse of just doing without overthinking. In this compressed time frame, there are often forms that have a visual connection to the structure of short-form stories, poems or three-minute songs.  In other instances, a more imaginary and chaotic adaptation is applied to the pieces.

Drawings not intentionally responding to the structure of poems or emphasizing visual alignment with the mood of a short story develop in ways where such connections to the source material are less evident. These works explore figure-ground relationships, creating contrasts between different patterns and textures, and the interplay of flatness and illusory depth. This consistent push-and-pull builds a lyrical quality or syntax into the compositions, leaving viewers questioning how they perceive the page.

The themes in Morgan’s work—including humor, mortality, and superstition—are extensive but have a unique ecology that shepherd us toward exploration. This sense of discovery and uncertainty is part of understanding what it means to be human while acknowledging that human-ness is ever shifting and never gospel.

***

Donald Morgan, born in 1969, has been exhibiting his sculptures, paintings, and drawings nationally and internationally for over twenty-five years. He has had solo exhibitions in Chicago at Devening Projects; in New York at Grid Space; in Milwaukee at The Green Gallery and General Store; in Minneapolis at SOO Visual Arts Center; in Springfield, Oregon at Ditch Projects; and in Portland, Oregon at Fourteen30 Contemporary, RocksBox Fine Art, and the Portland Biennial, curated by Michelle Grabner. 

He has been in group exhibitions in New York at White Columns, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and Pat Hearn Gallery; in Los Angeles at Roberts and Tilton, China Art Objects, and Human Resources; in Wichita, KS at the Ulrich Museum; in Cairo at the Palace of Fine Art; and in Zurich at Karma International, among many others. He has had residency fellowships in Peterborough, NH at MacDowell and in Ucross, WY at the Ucross Foundation. Most recently, he was a resident at the Poor Farm in Little Wolf, WI. He has been reviewed or received mentions in ARTFORUM, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, New Art Examiner, Minneapolis Star Tribune, ART WEEK, and The Oregonian, among others. He is the recipient of a Hallie Ford Fellowship and numerous grants and awards from the Oregon Arts Commission and The Ford Family Foundation. He lives and works in Eugene, OR, where he is an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Oregon. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2001.

Gallery Hours are Saturday 12-5 or by appointment during the run of exhibitions