KENNETH MORGAN High Street Gallery
Please click images above for full view.
Kenneth Morgan's small, playful ink drawings, energetic in the extreme, fairly burst out of their frames with exuberance.The work depicts the artist's unusual childhood.
Kenneth Morgan was born into a family of circus acrobats.
At nine months he was strapped into a bucket atop a pole balanced on his father's forehead. Good training for his later years as a "sway pole" acrobat.
Patriarch, Al Morgan, and his four children performed together across the United States and Canada as "The Al Morgan Family" (mother made the costumes) until the four children entered college.
Ken went off to art school.
A Connecticut native, Morgan later bought and restored the grange hall in Charleston, Maine where he lived and made art for several years before returning to Connecticut.
Now a burly personage in his mid sixties Morgan more closely resembles a wrestler in top condition than a trapeze artist which makes the tiny pictorial stories of his circus life incongruous and all the more fascinating.
Morgan has exhibited widely throughout the United States. His work is included in private, public and corporate collections across the country. He has received numerous honors and awards including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
This is his first exhibit in Portland. Morgan received a grant from A.R.T., a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, to make this body of work.
High Street Gallery