IL MAESTRO! Works by Morton Levin, A Centennial Celebration

April 3 – May 31, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, April 3, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Curator Lecture: Featuring Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the PGSMOA, Nicole Maria Evans, Saturday, April 25, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Curator Talk: Wednesday, May 20, 6:00 – 7:00 p.m.

Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art presents a celebratory exhibition Il Maestro! Works by Morton Levin, A Centennial Celebration. This unique exhibition features the work of Morton Levin (1923-2020), a master artist whose passion and unbending desire for art making and mastery led him on an intriguing life journey touched by the effects of war, love, family, life, and teaching. The exhibition highlights a special selection of the artist’s body of work beginning in the 1930s through 2005, while focusing on master works within his vast artistic repertoire.

This retrospective of Levin’s work is meant to mark 100 years of Levin’s life and is the first of its kind in a museum setting. Levin fought in World War II and survived, experienced the fervor of modernism in Europe and the United States, and received an education in the arts post WWII through a G.I. Bill—also known as the Service Men’s Readjustment Act of 1944. With access to education, a passion for art, and a means to live, Morton Levin created art, lived art, and loved through art. Though his post WWII artistic contemporaries in the United States were delving into abstract expressionism, minimalism, and conceptualism, Levin was a contemporary artist devoted to the human figure. Early works, war drawings, paintings, prints, etchings, woodcuts, and engravings fill the exhibition space. The intent is to draw attention to his imaginative work and diversity of styles, as well as the profound understanding of artistic techniques in Levin’s career as an artist.

Levin’s work is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums—Legion of Honor and The de Young; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Rochester Institute of Technology, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; San Diego Museum of Art, California; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; New York Public Library; the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; The National Library of Medicine, Maryland and many important public and private collections in the United States and abroad. Publications include Morton Levin: Graphic Arts [1939-2012]; Morton Levin: Drawings [1939-2014]; and A Fantasy of Beasts Revealed in Great Art: What is Illusory is Made Real, all published by Egret Books.