Hilda Grossman Morris


Hilda Grossman Morris was a sculptor of the Northwest School, working mainly in bronze.

Biography

Grossman was born in New York City in 1911. She studied art at Cooper Union and the Art Students League of New York. Her first husband was Arthur Deutsch, from whom she was divorced in 1930.
In 1938 the Works Progress Administration hired her to establish the sculpture program at the Spokane Art Center in Spokane, Washington. In Spokane she met the artists Clyfford Still, Guy Anderson, and the Abstract Expressionist painter Carl Morris whom she married in 1940.
Morris and her husband settled in Portland, Oregon in 1941. Except for extended trips to her hometown New York City and in later years Pietrasanta, Italy to cast bronze sculptures, she worked in Portland. Her work introduced rigorous thinking about abstraction to the Pacific Northwest incorporating the rhythms of dance, music, and mathematics, emphasizing the organization of organic structure.
Hilda Morris' works have been shown in exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Portland Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; Dayton Art Institute; Amon Carter Museum; University of Illinois; Seattle World's Fair; University of California, LA; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, Brazil; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and American Federation of Arts traveling exhibitions. In 1960 she was awarded a major fellowship by the Ford Foundation. Commissioned sculptures by Hilda Morris are in the Seattle Opera House ; Standard Plaza, Portland ; and Pacific National Building, Tacoma, Washington.
Her work is represented in the collections of the Chase-Manhattan Bank; California Palace of the Legion of Honor; Museum of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute; University of Oregon Museum of Art; Reed College ; University of Victoria, BC; Tacoma Art Museum; Walter P. Chrysler Jr., Collection of the Virginia Museum; and San Francisco Museum of Art.
Morris died in 1991 in Orange, California. A retrospective of her work was held at the Portland Art Museum in 2006.