Artist-in-Residence

Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell, Painting and Sculpture, Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts, 2014. Pigment print on archival paper. 40 x 45.4 inches. Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery/New York.

During his FWM residency, Abelardo Morell created two new photographic series shot throughout Philadelphia. The first, titled Pictures in Three Museums, juxtaposed and transformed artworks within the extensive collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Barnes Foundation. Morell finds museums inspiring in “the way gallery spaces can seem to ‘play with’ the content of the pictures hanging in them. In several of these works I combined and altered art and rooms…to make a kind of art mash-up, creating new and impossible museum installations, art, and architecture.”

For Two Views of Philadelphia, Morell produced a limited-edition camera obscura print for FWM. His technique of turning a room into a pinhole camera resulted in a final image that overlays the city skyline within a Loews Philadelphia hotel room. Morell is well known for his distinctive use of camera obscura and has also modified the process considerably over time. As Morell explained, “I began to use color film and positioned a lens over the hole in the window plastic in order to add to the overall sharpness and brightness of the incoming image. Now, I often use a prism to make the projection come in right side up. I have also been able to shorten my exposures considerably thanks to digital technology, which in turn makes it possible to capture more momentary light. I love the increased sense of reality that the outdoors has in these new works. The marriage of the outside and the inside is now made up of more equal partners.”

Artist Bio

Cuban-American, born 1948, lives in Brookline, MA.

Photographer Abelardo Morell immigrated to the United States as a teen in 1962, completing his undergraduate degree at Bowdoin College in 1977 and his MFA in 1981 at the Yale University School of Art. Morell has exhibited his work extensively, and in 2013 the Art Institute of Chicago organized his retrospective, Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door, which traveled to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Major exhibitions of the artist’s work have been presented at the Yale University Art Gallery (2008); the Detroit Institute of the Arts (2001); the St. Louis Art Museum (2000); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1999); the Cleveland Museum of Art (1998); and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (1998). He has exhibited internationally in exhibitions staged at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Print Center, Philadelphia; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Morell’s creative process and experience as an artist was the focus of a 2007 feature length documentary, Shadow of the House.

Morell has received a number of grants and awards, which include a 1992 Cintas Grant, a 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the International Center of Photography’s 2011 Infinity Award in Art. He taught as a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design from 1983 until 2011.