Artist Morgan Craig Paints the Effects of Avarice

Silver City, Nevada - Philadelphia-based artist Morgan Craig captures the monumental space of abandoned industrial buildings like Bethlehem Steel in his vibrant oil paintings. His large canvases are in great demand in the U.S. and beyond. In the last few months alone, Craig has had shows in Virginia, Florida, and Colorado. In addition to being in exhibitions around the U.S., his artwork has been exhibited in Canada, Europe, and Australia.

Craig also paints sites that have been impacted due to man-made disasters. His painting of an abandoned classroom in Prypiat, Russia, a city lost to contamination from the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor, is haunting.

He writes, "My work is not merely a method of documentation, but a sociopolitical/ socioeconomic commentary on the effects of hubris, avarice, free trade, outsourcing, deregulation, deterritorialization, neoliberalism, obsolescence, and international-finance-capital upon communities throughout the world."

Silver City and the Comstock are naturally of interest to Craig. I was delighted when he applied for a spot at the Resident Artist Program in Silver City. When he arrives in July, he’ll see historic sites like historic mining mills and the hazardous waste Superfund sites some of them are located within. The industrial sites may serve as inspiration as he begins work on new, large scale oil paintings in the studio at McCormick House.

Craig has received numerous awards including the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2007, 2011), and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship for 2006 and 2008.

Rhizome, Morgan Craig's 72 " x 54" oil on linen painting, is based on historic mining mills on the Comstock in Gold Hill and Silver City.

You can view some of his latest artwork online on his own website, and also on the websites of various galleries. For instance, he had a solo exhibition titled Identifying with Artifice: the Specter of Capitalism at ArtSpace in Richmond, Virginia this spring. For that show, he wrote, “I believe that architectural structures acting as both repositories and as vehicles for memory profoundly influence culture and identity by providing a tangible framework through which facets of a society can be expressed. Consequently, I have been inspired to build a body of work dealing with how identity is influenced by the types of architectural edifices present in a given landscape.”

Also this spring, Morgan Craig and Andrew Leventis exhibited their paintings together in the Curfman Gallery at Colorado State University in a show titled Forgotten Spaces.

Currently, Craig has a solo show at the University of Central Florida titled Specters of Capital: An Exploration in Architecture and Identity. He writes, “Within the realm of Jacques Derrida’s theory of Hauntology, the paintings speak of the slow disintegration of the future, and the abysmal fragmentation of the past.”

You might see Morgan Craig out and about on the Comstock this summer, looking for places of interest to paint. If you’d like to meet him and learn more about his work, he will speak about his creative process in an illustrated lecture at the Brick in Carson City on July 25 from 5pm-6:30pm, along with NYC artists Adrian Landon and Ewelina Bochenska, visiting artists at the Buffalo Creek Art Center near Minden, Nevada.

More about Morgan Craig: http://morgancraig.org/www.morgancraig.org/Future.html

*Published originally as a column by Quest Lakes in MVN June 2019