|
Morris Blackburn
Morris Atkinson Blackburn (1902–1979) was a printmaker, muralist, and teacher. He is considered to be a pioneer of silkscreen printing.[1] Blackburn's work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.[2][3][4][5] His papers are held by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.[6] Early life and educationBlackburn was born in Philadelphia in 1902.[1] He studied architectural drawing at the Philadelphia Trade School in 1918 after which he worked at the Hog Island shipbuilding yard.[7][6] Blackburn studied art at the Graphic Sketch Club, now the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, in 1922. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1925 to 1929.[1][7] While at PAFA, he studied sketching under Arthur Carles, painting under Henry McCarter, and drawing under Daniel Garber.[1] Career Artistic careerBlackburn was a painter and graphic designer. Much of his work featured scenes of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Taos, New Mexico.[8] He was an early adopter of the silkscreen process and often used it in his work.[8] Blackburn created two murals for the Works Progress Administration's Public Works Art Project in the mid-1930s. The murals were located at Mastbaum Vocational School and Haverford High School.[6] Teaching careerBlackburn began teaching at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts, in 1932.[6] He taught at various art schools, including the Tyler School of Art, from 1948 to 1952 and joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1952.[6] CollectionsWorks by Blackburn are kept in several museum collections:
References
Further readingPhiladelphia: Three Centuries of American Art, (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976), pp. 584–86. External links
|
||||||||||||
