Morgan O'Hara

Morgan O'Hara, Movement of the Hands Seiji Shimoda, Drawing, March 2004

2004

Morgan O'Hara was born in Los Angeles in 1941 but was raised in an international community in post-war Japan. She earned a master's degree in Art from California State University at Los Angeles, had her first solo exhibition in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1978. In the 1980s, she began doing performative drawing in international performance art festivals, did her first site-specific wall drawings and began the practice of aikido, a Japanese martial art. In 1997, O'Hara's work was honored with a solo show in the Drawing Room at the Drawing Center in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including The British Museum, London; Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Germany; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas; Czech National Gallery, Prague; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; Hood Museum of Art - Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; Janacek Museum, Brno, Czech Republic; Macau Art Museum, Macau, China; Moravian Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Olomouc Museum of Art, Czech Republic; Stedelijk Museum and the Vrije Universiteit OZW, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Amsterdam; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; Wannieck Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic; Weatherspoon Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina. Her permanent site-specific wall drawings can be found in the Macau Art Museum, Macau, China; The Canadian Academy Kobe, Japan, and the Vrije Universiteit OZW Building, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has been awarded numerous international residencies and is the recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation including the Lee Krasner Award for lifetime achievement; the Gottlieb Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Leon Levy Foundation, David and Rosamond Putnam Travel Fund and Milton and Sally Avery Foundation. O'Hara maintained her studio in Europe for 25 years. She currently resides in New York and works internationally.