Norma Morgan was born in New Haven, Connecticut. She became a member of the New York branch of Stanley Hayter's Atelier 17, one of only two female African Americans who are documented participants of the famed printing workshop. In an interview with E. Exler almost 40 years later (Norma Morgan: Romanticism and Printmaking, 1990) she stated she was 'especially attracted by erosion and objects affected by it'.
In 1951, the twenty-three year old African-American artist Norma Morgan won a Whitney Foundation award to travel to England and Scotland for a year. Morgan was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and had trained under Hans Hoffmann and then under Stanley Hayter, joining his Atelier 17 group in 1950. Art historian Christina Weyl’s 2019 book The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York details Morgan’s involvement and describes the peer group of women she worked amongst at the studio. As Weyl describes, Morgan was ‘one of two known female African Americans” in the group. Weyl also describes how, after initially making abstract works under Hayter’s tutelage, Morgan’s visit to the UK was to inspire a complete change in her artistic output.
The landscapes of the UK, in particular Scotland and the Yorkshire Moors, were to have a profound effect on Morgan’s practice. She found moorland and windswept structures particularly intriguingIn a complete change from her earlier colourful and abstract artworks, she began making atmospheric copper engravings of vistas in nature, often including old or derelict buildings. Writer Bruce Weber asserts that as well as being inspired by the writings of Thomas Hardy and the Brontë sisters, Morgan was drawn abroad by her admiration for the romantic landscapes of Scotland by the 19th-century African American painter Robert S. Duncanson. Her prize-winning work Moor Claimed depicts a ruined farmhouse in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It was made in 1953 and was purchased by the V&A direct from the artist in 1963, for £15. Morgan won a gold medal from the American Artists Professional League for graphic arts and the bronze medal in the Audubon Artists Show for this print.
Morgan’s prints speak to a long European tradition of landscape etching and engraving. Moor Claimed can be seen as part of a tradition which includes works by Old Masters such as Rembrandt, and also more recent British printmakers such as George Cuitt, F.L. Griggs and Joseph Webb.