Exhibition catalogue from Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry at the Belkin (13 January-8 April 2012) with essays by Jamie Hilder, David MacWilliam, Michael Turner, Scott Watson and William Wood; edited by Scott Watson and Jana Tyner. Published in conjunction with Black Dog Publishing, UK, this richly illustrated book includes critical essays on concrete poetry and Michael Morris, featuring a chronology of Morris’s prolific practice from the mid-1960s onwards. It follows the 2012 exhibition of the same name, which focused on a series of large-scale paintings with inserted mirrors that Morris made in 1969 — his last paintings until the early 1980s — brought together at the Belkin for the first time since then. The Belkin’s exhibition Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry presented the paintings in the context of contemporaneous examples of concrete poetry, a practice that had influenced Morris and catalyzed his move into other forms of art making such as sculpture, photography and performance, examples of which were also represented in the exhibition. This book focuses on Morris’s activity in the late 1960s and his “last paintings,” in an attempt to restore them to an art historical context. In his roles as a curator and primarily as an artist, Michael Morris was a key figure of the West Coast art scene since the 1960s and his contribution to the development of Vancouver as a contemporary art city has been immense. Morris was engaged with Concrete Poetry in the 1960s. The Concrete Poetry movement was perhaps the first global art movement, springing up in South and North America, Japan and Europe in the mid to late 1950s. Recognizing the potential of Concrete Poetry as an area that included design, poetry, architecture, art and communications, Morris co-curated an important exhibition of Concrete Poetry at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery in 1969. It presented a selection of Morris’ large “Letter” paintings and a selection of international concrete poetry from the period. During this time, Morris was also working on his most ambitious series of paintings, Letters (produced from 1967 to 1969) —for the first time all seven are presented in this exhibition. Composed of vertical bands of gradated colour and divided into triptychs by Plexiglas and concave mirror insets, the Letter Paintings were named after the “Letter” column in Art International magazine. (Morris’ work had been discussed in “Los Angeles Letter” in the December 1967 issue.) Paris, London, New York, Peking, Rome, Los Angeles, Madrid; there are seven large paintings plus a study for the largest, New York Letter. The study has never been exhibited in Vancouver.
