Sister Gertrude Morgan

            
             American 1900 - 1980 Sister Gertrude Morgan was an active member of the Baptist Church since her childhood days in Lafayette, Alabama. She was 37 years old when she found her true vocation, as she told it, "A voice spoke to me and said to go and preach, tell it to the world". She followed this command and became a street evangelist. Sister Gertrude Morgan preached in Georgia and Alabama and eventually settled in New Orleans when she became the recipient of another divine order that told her she "was married to the lamb, Christ". From this time on, she began to only dress in white. Sister Gertrude Morgan founded an orphanage in New Orleans, which was later destroyed in 1965 by Hurricane Betsy. She then rented another building which she named "The Everlasting Gospel Mission". It was during this time that she turned to her art with great intensity. She gave up street preaching to concentrate on passing on the lord's word through her paintings. She sold these works with the help of her landlord, E. Lorenz Bernstein, a local gallery owner. By 1970, Sister Gertrude Morgan's paintings had received attention beyond its religious import and was included in many exhibitions, such as a three person show at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York and the Twentieth Century Black American Folk Art Show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC. She stopped painting in 1978 due to the lord's command. REFERENCE: "Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Folk Art and Artists", Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Abbeville Press Publishers, New York, NY, 1990.