Let Us Celebrate While Youth Lingers and Ideas Flow

During the 1960s and 1970s, the austerity of Minimalism and Conceptualism dominated the American art world. Ree Morton was one of several artists working at this time who challenged that prevailing aesthetic. Decorative, narrative, and feminine, Morton's art stood in contrast to the unadorned purity and machine-like precision of works by Minimalists such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. She pioneered the use of narrative in contemporary art, giving artists permission to take specific events of their lives and directly transmute them into art. Her work has a ritualistic quality, as if she were creating memorials to experiences, ideas, people, and places she loved. While Morton often used the funerary trappings in her art - flowers and drapery - her work is more celebratory than morbid. Morton combined sculpture and painting through a material called Celastic, which could be draped like fabric and then hardened. She created banners and ribbons emblazoned with cryptic messages spelled out in gooey letters like those on a birthday cake, as "Let Us Celebrate While Youth Lingers and Ideas Flow" demonstrates. Florid and sadly prophetic, this painting/sculpture hybrid suggests that we enjoy youthful pleasures now, before it is too late. Morton, a Tyler School of Art graduate, died tragically at the age of forty-one in a car accident, two years after completing this work.