Gordon Mortensen

Gordon Mortensen was born near Arnegard, North Dakota, on 27 April 1938. He took a BFA with honors at the Minneapolis School of Art in 1964 and was in the graduate program at the University of Minnesota from 1969 to 1972.¹

He began as a portrait painter and gave that up almost entirely for the reduction woodcut. The Annex Galleries says he was then one of the few artists in the United States working this way. During the change he taught briefly at the Saint Paul Art Museum, the Rochester Art Center and the Minnetonka Art Center.¹

His color woodcuts first circulated through exhibitions in the Midwest. They reached a wider audience in 1976, when he showed in the Brooklyn Museum’s National Print Exhibition. The next year he joined the Boston Printmakers.¹

The early prints are smaller, with fewer colors. The later ones are more colorful and can be forty inches and more on the long side. His subjects moved with him, from the upper Midwest of his early work to California, where his dealers say he now lives.^1,3,8

Museums hold his prints. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has Lagoon and Highlands, a museum purchase; the Chazen Museum of Art has Late January (1975); and the Plains Art Museum has Afternoon Reflections (1982). His dealer also lists the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others.^9,10,11,1

He made membership prints for the Albany Print Club and the Print Club of Rochester. The Rochester print, O’Keeffe Country, came out in 2007 in an edition of 100.^1,7