About Morgan Bulkeley, Artist
Biography
Morgan Bulkeley (1944 - 2026) was born in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. He was raised on a farm in the small town of Mount Washington, where his parents, both naturalists, raised many wild, orphaned animals. Morgan knew from the age of six that he wanted to be an artist. After graduating from the Hotchkiss School and Yale University, he had a stint with the Coast Guard, followed by a year in Newark, New Jersey, drawing and working with VISTA Programs. Subsequently he spent 14 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he immersed himself in the Boston artist community and exhibited his paintings and sculptures at many Boston galleries and local museums. In 1985 he returned to his childhood home on the mountain where he lived with his environmentalist wife Eleanor Tillinghast. There he continued to steward the land and sculpt in wood while making his primary painting studio in a 19th century brick building in nearby downtown Great Barrington. Morgan continued to exhibit widely and had a major retrospective of his work at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 2017.
Berkshares
Morgan's painting "Bash Bish Gap" was selected to grace the W.E.B. Dubois five BerkShares note. BerkShares is a local currency for the Berkshire region of Massachusetts that launched in September of 2006. Each denomination has a local hero on the front and a the work of a local artist on the back.
Résumé of Morgan Bulkeley
Birth Date: June 30, 1944
Education: 1966, Yale University, B.A. English Literature
View selected solo shows, group exhibitions, awards, bibliography, and catalogue
Catalogue Essay | by Geoffrey Young
If polar icecaps melted and rain fell endlessly and we suddenly needed an Ark stocked for the next millennium, I'd know who to call. In charge of lining up bird, beast, wildflower, tree & other phenomena of the natural world would be Morgan Bulkeley, in whose view of the creation no critter goes unvalued. The son of a naturalist, and himself a lifelong devotee of bird and free-range beast, Bulkeley has a well-developed sense of the fragile balance in which nature and man co-exist. In his world, rattlesnake, weasel, spoonbill and butterfly would file in next to thistle, fern, grass, and wildflower (among all things great and small) in one generously fluid category labeled: "All Equally Beautiful and Necessary." Humans, too, would be included, but it is not clear if our species would be allowed above steerage...