Robert Lee Morris is an American jewelry designer and sculptor who attributes much of his inspiration to organic forms he admires in nature and to designing for an imaginary, futuristic, "post-apocalyptic" society. He designs wearable art in gold, silver, bronze, and leather, often incorporating his signature look of 24-karat matte gold plating and rich deep-red copper and green patina as a common thread that connects his work over the decades.
Morris's career was launched in 1973 at the original Sculpture to Wear, which was located in the Plaza Hotel in NYC. He showed his work alongside jewelry by Picasso, Calder, Man Ray, and Louise Nevelson. In 1977, he forever changed the way we view jewelry in a retail setting by opening his iconic gallery, ARTWEAR, which showed artists including Cara Croninger, Ted Muehling, Kiff Slemmons, Bob Ebendorf, Arline Fisch, and Jamie Bennett.
Morris has designed award-winning jewelry collections for fashion designers such as Geoffrey Beene, Kansai Yamamoto, Calvin Klein, Anne Klein, Karl Lagerfeld, and Michael Kors. He had an especially celebrated collaboration with Donna Karan from 1983 to 2016. Morris was awarded the Coty Award and three Council of Fashion Designers of America awards, including the Geoffrey Beene. This is equivalent to winning the Academy Award for fashion design, and Morris is the only jewelry designer to ever earn such an achievement. His work is in the permanent museum collections of MOMA, the Smithsonian, the Met, FIT-NY, and FIDM-LA, among other prominent private collections.
