Nyeema Morgan

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Nyeema Morgan (born 1977) is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. She works in drawing, sculpture, and print media, exploring how meaning is created and communicated within complex social and political systems.

Education and early life
Morgan was born in Philadelphia to artists Arlene Burke-Morgan and Clarence Morgan and grew up in Greenville, North Carolina. She attended South High School in Minneapolis and, as a youth, was mentored by Rafala Green, Seitu Jones, and Ta-coumba Aiken. She helped recreate a mural for the North Community Mural Project. She earned a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2000 and an MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2007.

Career and works
Morgan has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Her works are in the permanent collections of Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection. One piece, yawar mallku (sculpting elsewhere in time / the arc of the moral universe is long… / the Lesson, pt. 2), is a permanent sculpture at the Menil and features a miniature wooden spacecraft with a library that includes Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.

Other notable works include Like It Is: Those Extraordinary Twins, a graphite drawing in Bowdoin’s collection based on a page from Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson. Forty-Seven Easy Poundcakes Like Grandma Used To Make is a series of 47 text-based digital drawings on recipe cards, reflecting on authenticity and memory. The project debuted in 2012 at The Bindery Projects, and a 2013 BRIC Arts Media solo show featured 47 actual pound cakes baked by volunteers.

Recent and ongoing projects
In 2020, Morgan presented The STEM. THE FLOWER. THE ROOT. THE SEED. at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, a solo show with several installations and participatory elements. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Galerie Jeanroch Dard, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the Museum of African and Diasporan Arts. In 2013 she participated in Afrofuturist programming The Shadows Took Shape at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Recognition, teaching, and personal life
Morgan has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Foundation and the Art Matters Foundation. She has lectured at institutions including the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Minnesota, Washington and Lee University, and Brooklyn College. She lives in Chicago with her husband, artist Mike Cloud, and they have two children.