Artist’s Bio

John Morse’s love of art began as a young boy growing up in a small town near the Georgia-Florida border.   When he was 11, a local professional artist who taught art classes for adults invited him to attend the classes for free, which he did for the next four years.  Classes covered a variety of media but mostly emphasized oil painting.

By the time he was 12 he began earning small commissions for portraits, landscapes and murals.  At 15 he worked after school and on weekends as a sign painter, including billboards, a skill that supplemented his income for the next decade.  At 16, he left home and moved to the Oregon coast where he honed his skills in award-winning graphic arts, including supergraphic murals in homes, schools and other locales.  After finishing high school he received no further formal art training.

In his early 20s he moved to Barcelona where he earned a living painting watercolors on the street.  It was around this time he began creating collage portraits and landscapes from found papers, usually litter.  While in Barcelona he became art director at Diagonal, a leading art and culture magazine of Spain stylized in the fashion of Andy Warhol’s Interview.

While in Barcelona, he and a fellow expatriate founded Chi-Perro (a modification translation of “Chic Dog”), an art studio specializing in art and fashion crafted from disposable plastics such as trash bags and cellophane wrap.

After Spain, Morse returned to America, arriving for the first time in New York City.  The city became his new home and he immediately immersed himself in the thriving downtown art scene.  From 1984 to 1988 he produced a weekly public access cable show called “A-R-T.”  Each episode presented a silent, 30-minute “glimpse” of a slowly unfolding tableau.  The episodes aimed to convert the television — which then was typically a cube of plastic sides with a convex glass front  — into a temporary sculpture. The first episode featured a chicken baking in an oven (“Oven”).  Later episodes included clothes tumbling in a dryer (“Dryer”), the face of a clock clicking away the minutes in real time (“Clock”), a focus on a single black hole that appeared in the middle of the screen (“Hole”), and uninterrupted half-hour views from his apartment window (“East Village Window” and “Back Window”).

During this time he also worked as a full-time professional journalist, including serving as editor-in-chief at US Business Press and senior editor at Fairchild Publishing.

In 1986, he volunteered to help in Mark di Suvero’s efforts to create Socrates Sculpture Park at the edge of the East River in Long Island City, New York, across from Manhattan, helping to transform an abandoned riverside landfill into an international sculpture center dedicated to the exhibition of monumental work.  His volunteer efforts including serving on the park’s inaugural board of directors for 14 years.  Among his works chosen for display at the park included several opening day installations, flag sculptures and a mural that still stands at the park’s eastern edge.  Socrates is now part of the New York City Parks Department.

While in New York he also served for 18 years as a volunteer tutor to  students at PS 6Wo0 and PS 61 in his East Village neighborhood.

His collages, sculptures, installations, watercolors and drawings have been exhibited in multiple venues, incluing the Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn; Islip Art Museum, Islip, New York; DUMBO Art Center, Brooklyn; San Francisco Contract Design Center; Match Fine Print, New York; Abernathy Arts Center, Atlanta; World of Coca-Cola, Atlanta; Hudgens Center for the Arts, Duluth, Georgia; and the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock.

In 2013, Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona presented a two-part show of his mobiles and sculpture.  His most recent museum exhibit included two of his works in “30 by 30” at the Palm Springs Museum of Art in California in 2019.

His publishing history includes authoring, editing and writing several books, including non-fiction titles published by Monacelli Press, McGraw-Hill, Henry Holt and Random House.  In 2005 he created 39 original collages for Categories: On the Beauty of Physics, published by Vernacular Press and described by Raina A. Lampkins-Fielder of the Whitney Museum of Art as “a creative and liberating journey of the mind.”

An ongoing facet of Morse’s public art career revolves around visual poetry, a term coined by the Catalan master Joan Brossa.  Morse’s work has used common communication devices such as business cards (Business, signed and numbered edition of 500), leaflets handed out on public streets (Leaflet, signed edition of 1,000), “man with van” flyers taped to bus shelters and other street furniture (Moving Very Moving, signed edition of 1,000), and a photo magazine surreptitiously left one at a time in waiting rooms, hair salons, news stands and other locations where magazines are found (Look, individually numbered edition of 5,000).

In 2010, he created Roadside Haiku, ten haiku poems in English and Spanish disguised as 500 “bandit” signs – the small signs tacked to utility poles or staked into the ground that typically promise weight loss or get rich quick schemes – and posted throughout the city of Atlanta.  The guerrilla installation, funded by Flux Projects, received international press coverage.

After hearing of his Atlanta project, in 2011 the New York City Department of Transportation commissioned Morse to create street installations using street signs.  The result, Curbside Haiku, placed poetry and imagery using the language of  common streets signs at 144 intersections in the city’s five boroughs. This project, too, received worldwide press coverage, including the Rachel Maddow Show, an interview with BBC News, The New York Times, The New York Post, CBS Morning Show and an interview with PBS’s Scott Simon.

Curbside Haiku earned Morse the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York, given annually to an artist whose work captures “the energy and spirit of New York.”   The project was also selected as one of the 50 outstanding works of public art in America by Americans for the Arts Public Arts Network, the nation’s largest organization of public arts administrators.

In 2014 Morse created a guerrilla performance installation at Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Color Spectrum at the Guggenheim.  The work featured six people, each outfitted in an oversized t-shirt of one of the colors of the rainbow flag, slowly descending the museum’s iconic spiral walkway while consistently maintaining their position in the color spectrum.

The color spectrum is a frequent touchstone within his body of work, as is the American flag and the imagery of street signs, which he describes as “urban hieroglyphics,” all used in wide variety of formats and materials.

In 2018, the City of Los Angeles launched his Rainbow Halo, a citywide sculptural installation that serves as an homage to Angelenos who’ve lost their lives to traffic violence.  The project places small, colorful liquid-filled cells overhead on tall street posts.

in 2019, his design for a clothesline featuring oversized sheets of the rainbow flag, Clothesline as Color Spectrum, was awarded Best Temporary Piece of Art by the City of Palm Springs Arts Commission.

His American flags have been featured in several venues, including New York’s Socrates Sculpture Park.

Much of Morse’s studio work concentrates on found paper collage, with an emphasis on portraiture.  He served as volunteer mentor to the Atlanta Collage Society from 2010 to 2011.  His collages and limited edition fine art prints are represented by AO5 in Austin.

Morse’s Star Dog Studio, established in 2011, is newly based in Machias, Maine.  His husband, Ross Douglas Pedersen, serves as studio director.