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Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Russell, Bruce

Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan. By William A. Fagaly, with essays by Jason Berry and Helen M. Shannon, and a foreword by Gerard C. Wertkin. New York: American Folk Art Museum and Rizzoli International Publications, 2004. xi + 108 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

One of the tragedies of the sin of racism is the degree to which African American spiritual traditions are marginalized within the larger Christian community. Certainly the world has long been aware of the great musical tradition of the old spirituals and of gospel singing, but what of the histories of religious movements and independent churches, what of anthologies of homiletic or other forms of spiritual writing that could teach all of us so much about strategies for effective culturally appropriate evangelism? How many white North Americans know the names, let alone the lives, of more than a handful of the great African American saints worshiping and laboring in rural southern communities or inner-city ghettos since emancipation?

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In the visual arts, when almost chance circumstances bring to our attention the religious works of African American artists, we can only wonder what else we have missed through our ignorance. The collaborative murals created in the 1940s in Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince, or more recently, by Mark Duke in the Church of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, are reasonably and deservedly well known, probably because of their location in mainline churches. Other marginal but deeply spiritual works by outsider artists are too often simply beyond the scope of the critical, academic, museum, and market-driven art world. Exceptions that come to mind are the Depression-era stone sculptures of William Edmonston of Nashville or the strange idiosyncratic sculptures of Jason Hampton made for his Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly, now preserved in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, in Washington, D.C.

It is, therefore, a great pleasure to encounter Sister Gertrude Morgan and the "tools of her ministry" through the recent exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York and in the accompanying monograph by William A. Fagaly and associates.

Morgan was born in 1900 in Lafayette, Alabama. She moved to New Orleans in 1939 in the wake of a failed marriage, where she collaborated in establishing an orphanage with two other women, which continued to serve the Lower Gentilly neighborhood until it was closed by the city in 1955. During these years Morgan developed an active preaching ministry, singing and accompanying herself to raise funds for the orphanage. After the close of the orphanage, Sister Morgan began to draw and write inscriptions from the Bible and of her own visions to use in her preaching. These works, as well as her music, began to attract the attention of a larger community including collectors, dealers, and jazz enthusiasts. This patronage helped support her evangelism and the purchase of a house, "The Everlasting Gospel Mission," from which she conducted prayer services and offered spiritual counseling.

New Orleans curator and authority on Louisiana folk art, William Fagaly, who knew Morgan, describes her as "a self-appointed missionary and preacher, an artist, a musician, a poet, and a writer possessed of a profound religious faith." He describes how people were "awed by her powerful presence and intimidated by her dogged determination to spread the gospel." Her work is compellingly revealing both of her own spiritual autobiography but also of the larger spiritual culture in which she was nurtured and in which she served. Tools of Her Ministry is an invaluable portal into a fascinating, under-documented, and too often ignored aspect of American spirituality.

BRUCE RUSSELL

St. George's Round Church

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2005
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Tools of Her Ministry: The Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Russell, Bruce

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