Joan Morris

Joan Morris has lived and worked in rural Vermont since the mid-1970s. Her studio practice has centered on art textiles, printmaking, and drawing, and merges shaped-resist dyeing with painting and drawing, erasing, and gilding on textiles as well as paper. Alongside her own art making, Joan has designed and fabricated textiles for theater, including, since its 1997 opening, Broadway and international productions of The Lion King, and productions of Dartmouth College’s Theater Department, where she served as master-dyer from 1983-2021. Beyond Dartmouth, Joan taught specialized textile processes, in particular, shaped-resist dyeing, the traditional antecedent of tie dye, internationally for thirty years.

Her collaborative projects have included a multi-year commission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to create a shaped-resist dyed art textile interpretation of four scenes of environmental significance that the Army Corps of Engineers had worked on over the years; developing a unique washable printing process whereby precious metals can be articulately printed on various substrates, including textiles—patented in 2003 with co-inventor Michele Ratté; and working with a Dartmouth math professor on a National Science Foundation-sponsored project to integrate shaped-resist dyeing into a course on pattern recognition and signal processing. Her work has been widely licensed, including for book and CD covers, among them the English translation of Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s The Lake, Sawako Ariyoshi’s The River Ki, Yoshiko Wada’s Memory on Cloth: Shibori Now, and the Nonesuch Records CD album Sunrings, featuring the eponymous composition by Terry Riley performed by Kronos Quartet. Her work is in the collections of The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; the Museum of Art at RISD; Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; The Ballinglen Museum of Art; and the Takeda Kahei Shoten in Arimatsu, Japan as well as in private collections. As a self-taught artist, Joan cites experiential learning, experimentation, and her lifelong passion for travel as key sources of learning and inspiration.

Multiple visits to Ireland—where she has been a four-time resident fellow of Ballinglen Arts Foundation, India, the Republic of Georgia, and Latin America have played a particularly important role. During the pandemic, Joan established a tiny company—Kanthi Mathi Kalamkari—to design and produce one-of-a-kind and limited-edition clothing that uses traditional South Indian block-printing with plant dyes from the Coromandel Coast.