Beloit College Magazine: Robert Lee Morris, Existentially True
Famed jewelry designer Robert Lee Morris’69 digs deep for inspiration. Some of his earlier influences came from the Logan Museum and the ideas swirling around the studios and classrooms of Beloit College.
VALERIE REISS
03/01/2007
Robert Lee Morris visited campus last fall, holding a trunk show, giving a public talk and book-signing, and speaking to classes from anthropology to economics to film. He accepted Beloit’s invitation to be the first guest speaker in a new series called “Beloit Originals.”
Most viewers who see Robert Lee Morris’69 on QVC, the shopping television channel, may not be aware that this hip, middle-aged man with a warm voice, engaging manner, and sandy, longish hair is a legendary designer. Those who do might be caught off-guard, sort of like stumbling on Queen Elizabeth eating at McDonald’s.
But Morris is on QVC for very good reasons. It’s not only that he can sell 2,000 pieces of jewelry in 10 minutes, a physically impossible feat in his SoHo-based New York City boutique. It’s also that he can talk on the network at length about each object he’s selling—the mythological, symbolic, or archaeological inspiration, the materials, weight, and feel of each ring, cuff, pendant, and earring. He describes the work in such detail, in fact, that he says blind people have told him that when their purchases arrived in the mail, they were exactly as they had imagined.
On a recent afternoon in his studio, an airy loft space crammed with a lifetime of creations and books, he was asked if QVC is the antithesis of the art he’s been honing for 37 years. He quickly shot back: “It’s the antithesis of Neiman Marcus. Selling your product is commercial any way you look at it. With QVC, at least I get to talk about it live, whereas when I sell through brick and mortar stores, I have no idea how they sell it or how they answer questions to the customers.” This way, he says, people know “what the thought process was behind the making of a piece so that when they get it, it has meaning and has spirit to them.”
It’s this spirit and sense of meaning that’s drawn so many people to his work. It’s what has made him seem lucky throughout his career, when it might be more accurate to say that he’s very, very good at what he does: expressing a distinct style with timeless meaning—and using his charisma and entrepreneurialism to sell the hell out of it.
The renowned jewelry designer’s work has been worn by the likes of Madonna, Beyoncé, Candice Bergen, Ozzy Osbourne, Andy Warhol, and Oprah (who famously bowed down in only half-joking reverence when she met him). His work has appeared in dozens of publications, including on covers of Vogue and In Style and in recent issues of Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Lucky, Glamour, and GQ. He’s created collections with fashion designer Donna Karan for more than 20 years and essentially changed the way we think about jewelry with his organic, bold, body-hugging signature creations.
In press interviews over the last 30 years and in his memoir, Robert Lee Morris: The Power of Jewelry (2004), Morris repeatedly attributes his ability to be “existentially true” to himself, as well as his archaeologically rooted approach to art, to his experiences and education at Beloit College.
Born in Nuremburg, Germany, in 1947, Morris was the child of an Air Force pilot and a fashion model. By the time he came to the College, his family had moved more than 23 times, living everywhere from Japan to Brazil. After graduating from high school in Rio, he started at Beloit studying pre-med (his father wanted him to be a doctor). But he quickly realized that hard sciences were not for him.
At the time, the College was in the throes of the ’60s and a non-traditional, highly interdisciplinary curriculum. Morris soon delved into a liberal arts succession of psychology, sociology, existentialism, anthropology, archaeology, and art classes. He loved the “common courses,” a requirement for first-years. “They were topics like, ‘Navajo Ritual and Freud and John Cage Dance’—how do these three relate, what are these three about?” he says. The effect on Morris was profound: “It cemented in my head the unity of all the topics, of all the courses. Nothing could be irrelevant.” Some students couldn’t handle the unstructured curriculum, he says, but he “just went bonkers with it.”
It was the existentialists—Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus—who really knocked him for a psychic loop. They taught him that, “you were responsible for your own actions, that you had to live your life in an existentially authentic way,” he says. “…That was crippling because I had always believed there was a higher source that would save me.” He slumped into a suicidal depression.
He was rescued by a combination of the ancient artifacts in Beloit’s Logan Museum of Anthropology and the ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan. “Everyone in society has a certain role to play,” Morris says, “and artists especially have an obligation because they have a gift. And that’s not just a gift for them to have fun with, that’s a gift for the social structure.”
“And that made a tremendous amount of sense to me because I did have this gift and was using it to be very expressive of what I felt, but then it dawned on me that I could actually declare myself an art major,” he says. “Because what I would be doing as an artist would be making artifacts that reflected the culture around me. So I made a pact with myself that I would be completely existentially true to myself and be an artist, embrace it fully, and give it all I had … that gave me a phenomenal anchor.”
In his senior year at Beloit, Morris became a filmmaker, creating 15 shorts. He would show them to a whooping, packed Chamberlin auditorium—charging $1 a ticket. The films were experimental. “They were hilarious,” he says. “One was about how the love for something can become so overwhelming that you die in that love. So I did a film called Chocolate Pudding, and it was the experience of a woman making chocolate pudding. When she tasted it she went into this reverie, this fantasy, where she actually ended up drowning in the pudding.” The films, he says, “capture the moment, that psychedelic moment.”
Beloit didn’t offer jewelry making, so it wasn’t until after graduation that Morris started banging metal into adornments—but the seeds were planted at the College. In his book, he recalls spending hours watching sculpture professor George Garner, a bearded man who rode a motorcycle and drove a pickup, “as he gracefully built intricate jewelry pieces with an oxygen-acetylene torch. All the ashes were falling from the ever-present, unfiltered Camel cigarettes smoking somewhere in his beard.” He “made jewelry look like a noble, masculine craft, like blacksmithing, instead of the introverted, feminine, and overly precious medium I had once thought it was.”
After graduating in 1969, Morris and some friends rented an abandoned farm, named it Big Ted’s Farm, and started an artists’ commune. They made art and cooked vegetarian food together; the women went topless, and they all took plenty of hallucinogens. Morris read a book on jewelry-making and spent nights blaring Led Zeppelin music as he hammered and bent wire and salvaged metal. His earliest pieces already had hints of his signature bold, tribal style.
About a year later, though, the commune accidentally burned down while Morris was visiting a friend in New England. He soon moved in with a college friend in Vermont, where he made jewelry that he sold at craft fairs. One day, a woman who bought a necklace from him called to invite him to Boston. Her bosses, owners of an important art gallery, had seen the necklace, and they asked him to be part of a new gallery they were opening in New York City’s Plaza Hotel, called “Sculpture to Wear.” His work would be shown along with jewelry designed by Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, and Roy Lichtenstein. “We will make you famous one day,” he recalls them saying. “It was over-the-top crazy,” Morris says. But it also made sense somehow. “It was like my dharma. It was all falling into place.”
His work sold well. And when he eventually moved to New York, it sold even better. In fact, he says, it outsold all the other artists’ work, combined. It was the 1980s, and his pieces were perfectly in tune with the times: big, bold, and sexy. He made giant brass belt buckles, concave textured discs, form-fitting knuckle rings, curvy cuffs. His inspirations were bones, bullets, leaves, crosses, hearts, vertebrae, goddesses, indigenous cultures, the Egyptian wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He turned metal into something rich and primitive, brand new and unearthed. Sometimes it appeared molten and polished and other times beaten and rough. But all of it looked very him, something he has painstakingly honed; “signature style” is a term he uses again and again to measure and describe his work. It rides the edge between ancient and now.
He went on to collaborate with designers including Donna Karan, Karl Lagerfeld, and Calvin Klein. When Sculpture to Wear eventually closed, he opened his own gallery in 1977, Artwear, to showcase new jewelry artists. It was also a huge hit, drawing celebrities and attention from myriad corners of the world for nearly 20 years. He and his fellow gallery artists had their work featured in 49 consecutive issues of Vogue. In addition to his roster of star clients, Morris socialized with some of New York’s biggest scenemakers: Diana Vreeland, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring. In 1995, the Fashion Institute of Technology showed a retrospective of his work called “Metalmania;” it included more than 1,000 pieces.
But success didn’t spoil him. “He’s always stayed so genuine and sincere even though he’s really become famous and done well and is respected worldwide,” says long-time friend, Karen Howard (P’91) of Rockton, Ill., who sold Morris’ jewelry at her arts co-op just down the road from Beloit in the days of Big Ted’s Farm. “We always called him Bob back then, because Robert Lee was just his signature. But he’s always stayed Bob. He’s always stayed the guy we knew.” Though, she adds, “He dresses a little better than he did back then.”
Morris has kept his fame and success in perspective through his spirituality. In the mid 1990s, fried from churning out 18 collections a year with Donna Karan, Morris bought 650 acres of wilderness land in New Mexico, in “Georgia O’Keeffe country.” He had a series of mystical experiences there, leading him to explore shamanism “as a spiritual path, not a religion.” Over three years he completed a shamanic training program. “You learn, really, how to work miracles,” he says. “You learn healing techniques. And it’s all basically drums and percussion and you go into journeys and you’re able to be visionary. You go in with questions and you come out with answers that the spirits give you.”
His life was utterly transformed—to the extent that he feels he can transmit his soul’s essence through his work and being. His QVC viewers “tune in and they react with this fervor to my voice and my presence and my beliefs,” he says. “And I’m getting the impression that I have indeed become somewhat of a minister and a healer at the same time—by just being an artist. Because I’m an artist who’s inspired by nature, and when I talk about the inspiration, and when I talk about the process, it becomes a very moving and healing experience for the audience.”
He also imbues his pieces with healing intention so that, like ancient amulets, they “have a spirit.” Fans tell him they find his work soothing and grounding.
Recently ensconced in his studio, wearing round red glasses, a green apron, and a red Gap T-shirt with the word “Inspi(red)” on it, Morris seems equal measures content and ambitious. The 59-year-old is in no danger of slowing down: He has a slew of upcoming projects, from a line of housewares for QVC to an official Andy Warhol jewelry collection, to a sexy gold perfume bottle for Donna Karan. And after years of living the bachelor’s life, he married Susan Fekete, a sales director for Karan, in 1998; they had a daughter a year later. He’s also been speaking to audiences of fellow entrepreneurs and artists, encouraging them with his stories and rock-solid belief in who he is and why he’s here.
As part of his Beloit visit, he talked with students, visited Beloit’s Center for Entrepreneurship, and served as a source of inspiration to students. “Robert is an extremely creative person who found ways of making a really good living doing what he loves to do,” says Beloit Professor of Economics Jerry Gustafson, who directs the College’s Center for Entrepreneurship. “He is an inspiration to those who want to maintain their creative life and to live by that.”
Morris’ clear self-belief is another thing he credits to Beloit, where he’ll be the honorary chair for the 2008 Beloit International Film Festival next January. He’s in the “tedious process” of digitizing the original Super 8 films for the event—inspired by his “first love” (film), and by all Beloit gave him: “By the time that we left College or even before, I had become grounded, I knew who I was, I knew what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. “So I was very pleased with my Beloit education.”