Dear Colleagues,

I am saddened to share the news that Philip Morsberger, professor emeritus and valued member of the CCA community, passed away of complications due to COVID–19 on January 3 in Augusta, Georgia. He was 87.

Over his long career as a painter, Philip exhibited around the world, and his work is held in the permanent collections of many museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San José Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Ashmolean Museum at University of Oxford, where he both studied and taught. 

Philip joined the CCAC faculty in 1987, when he was appointed President’s Council Fellow by President Neil Hoffman, and taught in the Fine Arts Painting program for a decade. He brought a wealth of expertise as both an artist and teacher to the college, having taught previously on the faculties of Oxford (where he created the first accredited BFA degree program at the Ruskin School of Drawing in 1978), Harvard, Dartmouth, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley. 

In 1997 Philip took a leave of absence from CCAC to accept an appointment as William S. Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta State University in Georgia, a position he held until his retirement five years later. He continued to live and work in Augusta for the remainder of his life.

CCA Libraries’ Jennine Scarboro, who studied with Philip, remembers him as an artist and teacher “devoted to the work of painting, insistent that to make great work we needed to ‘show up.’” She recalls him telling his students “that we should be in the studio painting every day . . .  that we had to be constantly working at painting. That stayed with me, and I believed that he devoted that constant effort to his painting as well.”

My thoughts are with Philip’s family and friends. The CCA community feels his loss.

Sincerely,

Steve