Publication: Eugene Register-Guard
Date: 04/23/21

Barbara Morgan, 79, of Springfield, Oregon died April 20, 2021.

Barbara L. Morgan (August 2, 1941 - April 20, 2021) was a liberal
activist, photographer and feminist historian throughout the '70s and
'80s. Morgan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Louese Morgan
and William R Morgan, a professor of ceramics, specializing in the
diffusion of liquids in ceramic bodies.She lived in Westboro,
Massachusetts, but moved to Urbana, Illinois where her father worked
as a professor at the University of Illinois and Barbara attended Leal
school for first and second grade.

Her father soon moved to Detroit to take on consulting work, and the
family followed, despite housing shortages in Detroit. They settled in
the nearby suburb of Birmingham where Morgan attended Quarton school,
and then on to Kingswood School Cranbrook, despite one principals'
admonishment that "if she [didn't] change her ways, she [would] never
get to high school." While gaining a reputation as somewhat of a
troublemaker, her literary skills were apparent from a young age, with
an aptitude for latin and having won school spelling bees as
well as Scholastic Writing Awards from the Detroit News
Morgan matriculated at Mount Holyoke College in 1959 and was awarded
the Louise Sproule Prize for poetry and prose in 1960 as well as
competing against five other student poets for the Kathryn Irene
Glascock memorial poetry prize in 1961. At Holyoke she was also
elected poetry editor of the Pegasus, Mount Holyoke's Literary
magazine.

She graduated from Holyoke in 1963 and spent the mid-sixties traveling
England and Scotland conducting historical research. Having received
her Masters in Social Studies from the University of Chicago in 1965,
Morgan settled in Chicago and continued her historical research
at the University and by 1969 became involved with the second wave
feminist movement through a a variety of political action groups
including the Women's Radical Action Project at the University of
Chicago and the Chicago Women's Liberation Union. Morgan was a
founding member of the Chicago Women's Graphics Collective (CWGC),
which aimed to produce feminist art for the sake of political
revolution outside of the conventions of the traditional male-centric
art world, in a communal non competitive atmosphere. The group
primarily produced silk screened posters with political messages,
which could be easily reproduced and to reach a wider audience. CWGC's
bold serigraphs dominated the national feminist poster market for a
decade. Many of these posters can be found today on display at
museums across the United States including the Cooper Hewitt, the
Oakland Museum of California, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art.

Morgan understood the significance of the times in which she lived,
safeguarding her journals from 1963 and well into 2011. These journals
place Morgan at the American Historical Association's highly
documented 1969 Annual Meeting in DC with the Radical Historians'
Caucus, the newly formed Coordinating Committee on Women in the
Historical Profession (CCWHP) and the birth of the Radical History
Caucus of the New University Conference (NUC) in Chicago. During this
time she was also active in many political demonstrations, most
notably traveling to the 1971 May Day protests in Washington DC
against the war in Vietnam. She along with 40,000 other activists
camped out in West Potomac Park and flooded the city over the
course of two days. Barbara was arrested twice in those two days along
with 12,000 others, making it the largest mass arrest in US history.

Morgan moved to San Francisco in October of 1976 where she founded Red
Pepper Posters, a political art collective similar to the CWGC,
following in its unusual custom of endlessly reprinting its portfolio,
its key difference being Red Pepper's inclusion of men in the
organization. Red Pepper had a studio space at the historic Goodman
Building in San Francisco, a Victorian hotel which was saved by its
tenants from demolition where they continued to operate
the space in keeping with its seventy year history as a low-cost
living and working space for artists. The tenants co-managed the space
and operated a community art center at its storefront
as well as the Goodman Art Works Gallery where Red Pepper Posters
frequently displayed its pieces.

In 1987 Morgan decided to leave San Francisco, enchanted by the
histories of the pioneers and outlaws of 19th century West. Morgan
wrote to her mother, "Butch Cassidy had already charmed me in the
reading I did before my trip: how many bank robbers send a
photograph with a thank-you note to the bank afterwards?!" She
continued to travel throughout the rest of her life and lived in
Colorado, Wyoming, and Oregon, combining her twin passions: history
and photography. "I can never decide whether I love words or pictures
more." While at times a solitary figure, she maintained throughout her
life a love of correspondence and accumulated stacks of letters from
her mother and lifelong friends. Morgan wrote that she was "often more
comfortable writing than talking."