Sister Gertrude Morgan: The Mystic of New Orleans - Book - Page 113
through language and ideas that were not familiar to her, done so in a
way that minimizes, distorts, obscures, or shrinks the centrality of her
religious beliefs. It’s prudent to remember that such expositions reveal
more about the author’s values and ideologies than they do those of
Sister Gertrude.
There is value in examining Sister’s life in the broader historical
and cultural contexts that shaped her. However, it’s also important to
let the aesthetic creations and first-person records she left behind stand
alone as sufficient to communicate what her life was all about. While
my depiction of her story in this book is tempered by my own biases and
experience, I endeavored to let Sister Gertrude’s primary truth shine
through—a life lived for and with Big and Little Dada.
Sister Gertrude Morgan was a woman filled with the Holy Spirit
and on fire with God’s love. She expressed this inner fire directly through
her songs, poems, and paintings. As journalist James Everett noted, her
work was “spontaneous, almost uncontained in urgency, and childlike
in its openness and honesty.”1 George Viener, co-founder and owner of
Outsider Folk Art Gallery with his wife, Sue, wonderfully describes this
kind of self-taught art:
I know the difference between contrived art and noncontrived art. I love the fact that these people don’t have
any boundaries, that they haven’t been taught what the end
of the envelope is. They’ve got something in their mind, and
they have to create it. You don’t go to school to learn how
to do this. You either have it or you don’t, and that’s what
turns me on.2
Viener formerly owned one of Sister Gertrude’s renderings of
New Jerusalem that we present in this book. He concluded in his
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