“Through his Blessed hand as he take my hand and write… I just do the Blessed work.”
—Sister Gertrude

Sister Gertrude Morgan was a woman of tremendous religious faith. She would fashion a world around her filled with music, poetry, art - all in service of expressing a distinctive spirituality. Her life and spiritual self commingled. Her artistic output was a physical manifestation of this world view.

She was born Gertrude Williams on the seventh day of April 1900; the seventh child of a poor, rural family in Lafayette, Alabama. While still a teenager, she and her family moved across the river to Columbus, Georgia and she married Will Morgan in 1928.

Suddenly, in 1934, she received the first of a series of revelations that changed the course of her life. She left her home, husband and life to move to New Orleans to preach and serve God. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s she ran a mission and orphanage in the Lower Gentilly neighborhood. She was drifting through the city until the late 1950s, preaching her message on the streets, when she received another life changing revelation assigning her the role of the bride of Christ and directing her to paint the visions that God sent her. She would paint bright bold narrative pictures that interwove text and figures - integrating real events and people from her life in her depictions of this heavenly realm, the New Jerusalem.

Dressed in a nurse’s uniform, shoes and cap - she wore only white - signifying her role as a bride, but also as a spiritual nurse for those of this world. She set up the Everlasting Gospel Mission in the 9th Ward. It too, was all white, four leaf clovers filled the lawn and her prayer room within it became a refuge and place of pilgrimage.

She sang, preached, created religious poetry and art. She held services, took care of children and those in need. Her association with Larry Borenstein, the Jaffes, and Preservation Hall brought her art and music to a world- wide audience. By 1973 she had recorded an album, Let’s Make a Record, and had a booth at Jazz Fest. Artists sought her out from around the world. Her art was in museums and exhibitions and she was conducting press interviews. And then God told her to STOP painting. The rest of her life she devoted to her ministry.

She continued to be a spiritual nurse for those who would come to seek her at the Everlasting Gospel Mission until her death, July 8th, 1980. Then, years after her death, an examination began into her legacy… New artists took inspiration from her work in an entirely new context. And her story, her history is being written - in this very moment. Who is Sister Gertrude Morgan?

 “Go, Preacher, Tell it to the World!”