Merijean Morrissey

Professor Emeritus
BFA Illinois (Urbana),
Brooklyn Museum: Max Beckmann Fellow
Office: GLN115
Telephone: (905) 688-5550 ext. 5133
E-mail: morrisse@brocku.ca

Click HERE to view Brock Review article.

Click HERE to view a recent Brock News article.

Click HERE to visit her profile page at Graphic Studio Dublin.

Morrissey completed her BFA at the University of Illinois, also spending a year in Paris at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, followed by a term at the Art Institute of Chicago. With a Max Beckmann graduate fellowship in hand; she spent a year in New York at the Brooklyn Museum before returning to the University of Illinois in the MFA program in painting and printmaking.

Morrissey immigrated to Canada to teach painting and printmaking at the University of Ottawa. She then came to Brock where she teaches the Honours Studio as well as advanced painting and drawing.

Morrissey's own practice focuses on the use of poetic devices where visual metaphors are used primarily to enhance meaning. She is interested in memory and history with its inscribed record upended in a mythic journey. The work attempts to break free of logic and cultural boundaries. Pattern, the cosmos, and various cultural artifacts are depicted in the works. However, what is portrayed in the paintings and prints is often a lie. She has been working for a number of years on a very large body of work under the title of THE NAVIGATOR.

Morrissey has been an artist-in-residence at the Contemporary Artists' Center in North Adams, Massachusetts, with the Nagasawa Mokuhanga on the Island of Awaji in Japan, and will go next year to Ireland, where she will continue to make intaglio prints and search for the navigator.

Morrissey is the recipient of numerous Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Humanities Research Institute research grants, travel grants, as well as those from other institutions. She has also been on SSHRC, (including the inaugural SSHRC creative research jury) Canada Council, and Ontario Arts Council juries. Her work is represented in over 50 public collections and been exhibited in Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Chicago, Yugoslavia, Poland, England, Estonia and the U.S. and Canada.

Humanities Research Institute profile