Art for Expanding Your Mind (Naturally Speaking)
Inside Lily Morris’s studio, where painting extends beyond the canvas and into questions of nature, power, and possibility.
Good morning and happy July! This newsletter is a place of discovery and contemporary art education, and I am excited to dig into why it is just so dang exciting to visit an artist’s studio and how to decode an artist’s CV.
Last month, over the long holiday weekend, my summer associate and I visited several artists’ studios, including Lily Morris’s studio. It’s only when I’m standing in front of one of Lily’s works that my mind sees the space she is extending beyond the canvas edges. That’s the kind of artwork I want to live with, engage with, and learn from.
Her art changes scale and consciousness, rejecting material limitations without being inaccessible in its subversion. Lily’s paintings do not accept the limits of their canvases. Instead, they extend outward, gathering sculptural force and creating their own ecosystem of cosmic scale, organic matter, power, and care. I KNOW! Just wait till you see them in person!
(watch till the end for a guest appearance by yours truly)
Studio visits are one of the rare opportunities to encounter work outside the compressed cycle of an exhibition. You see paintings that are still in process, works that have never been installed publicly, and the fuller range of an artist’s practice. That access creates a more intimate understanding of an artist’s visual language and ambitions before you buy the artwork. For curators and gallerists, it is often where the possibility of an exhibition begins.
I first discovered Lily’s work in a group show at Eric Firestone two summers ago. I learned that Lily’s studio is Upstate and that she is from Martha’s Vineyard. The painting in the group show had sophisticated, deep, nautical motifs, and I ended up selling the work to a client who also had roots in Martha’s Vineyard. It was a perfect example of how an artwork can carry personal meaning, and how taking the time to learn more about an artist’s practice can reveal those connections.
I love when subscribers reply and ask for additional images of the work or more examples of the artist’s available pieces. That curiosity is the beginning of the acquisition process. The next step is to look more closely at the artist’s CV, which is usually divided into a few core sections:
Education
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Selected Group Exhibitions
Residencies, Awards, and Grants
Selected Publications and Press
Lectures and Talks
An artist’s CV contains a wealth of information that you can easily unlock to learn more about the art. Do not be intimidated by the list of galleries, museums, publications, and residencies you’ve never heard of. The pro tip here is to click through the press links and immediately access more information about the artist’s practice.
You can access Lily’s full CV here and one of the first things you will see is that she recently graduated from the MFA program at SUNY Albany. I like flagging these details because they locate her practice at a pivotal moment of expansion: the work is already materially assured, while the ideas and scale of the practice continue to open outward.
Below are a few selected publications and press highlights that offer especially useful entry points into her work:
Painters on Paintings (Lily Morris on Dustin Emory) — 2025
Chronogram Magazine (Cover) — 2024
Chronogram Magazine — 2021
Martha’s Vineyard Magazine — 2019
Playboy Magazine — 2018
Arts & Ideas Magazine — 2017
I love a 2024 Chronogram article that describes Lily’s paintings as placing the viewer “in the middle of a storm, in the midst of the magnificence of sailing ships, stormy seas, sunlight bursting through the clouds, and gazing up at the ropes of a ship’s rigging. The ropes in these latest works are riveting on their own. They look like something only a nautical genius could manage, yet Morris renders them organized, chaotic, detailed, and explored from every conceivable angle.”
The earlier Chronogram article traces Lily’s research into Roman augurs, priests who studied the flight of birds to intuit the will of the gods. It is a beautiful framework for thinking about her work: a practice attentive to nature, ritual, uncertainty, and the enduring human desire to make sense of what is coming next. That article also reveals how Lily’s paintings found their way into films including Bird Box with Sandra Bullock (!!).
What I find most compelling is that Lily builds an iconographic language from storms, skies, rope, and nesting material. Together, these elements become a system for thinking about what binds us, protects us, traps us, and helps us imagine a future.
The work is cosmic and the themes are powerful, but it is also intimate. It asks how power operates in nature and in our own bodies, homes, relationships, and systems of care. When I think about art I want to buy, I want it to make me feel something and make me think about something. Lily’s work checks both of those boxes.
Together, Lily’s studio, press, personal history, and materials reveal a practice far larger than any single image can hold.
I am over the moon to share with you several of Lily’s works that are available for acquisition now. I hope you enjoy discovering her practice, and I hope you ask me why she includes hornet nest paper as a material in some of her works. You’ll want to be sitting down with a notebook!!
