Ree Morton began taking art classes in the mid-1950s in Virginia, USA, as a nurse and housewife. She separated from her husband a decade later, and moved to New York to pursue an art career. 

Ree Morton produced a prescient body of work rich in emotion and philosophically complex. The works produced during her short but prolific career, span mediums and materials; reimagine tropes of love, friendship, and motherhood; and radically assert sentiment as a legitimate subject of artmaking.

Ree Morton received a BFA in fine arts from the University of Rhode Island in 1968 and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, in 1970. Solo exhibitions during her lifetime include projects at Artists Space, New York (1973); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974); and the South Street Seaport Museum, New York (1975). Morton was included in the 1973 and 1977 Whitney Biennials. She has had major retrospectives at the New Museum, New York (1980); the Generali Foundation, Vienna (2008); the Drawing Center, New York (2009);  the Reina Sofia, Madrid (2015); and The Insitute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (2018).