Morris Atkinson Blackburn, painter, muralist, printmaker, and teacher, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 13 October 1902. He studied architectural drawing at the Philadelphia Trade School in 1918 and worked as a technician for RCA between 1919 and 1920. He began studying art at the Graphic Sketch Club and the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in 1922. He continued his education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1925-29), where he studied painting with Henry McCarter, drawing with Daniel Garber, and sketching with with Arthur B. Carles, who became his mentor. He also studied with Stanley William Hayter in 1945 at the Print Club in Philadelphia. Blackburn worked as a painter, etcher, engraver, lithographer and serigrapher, being one of the pioneers in the development of silkscreen printing.

As an educator, Blackburn offered courses in painting and printmaking at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in the 1930s, then at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1952 to 1979.

Blackburn was a member of and exhibited with the Philadelphia Watercolor Club; the Print Club of Philadelphia; the Art Alliance of Philadelphia; the National Serigraph Society; the American Water Color Society; the Audubon Artists; and Allied American Artists. He won numerous awards including the John Gribbel Prize, Philadelphia Print Club, 1942; Gold Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1946; Fellowship Prize, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1949; Rosenwald Fund Grant, Print Club, 1950; Mary S. Collins Prize, Print Club, 1950; Harrison S. Morris Prize, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1951; Guggenheim fellowship, 1952; and the Thornton Oakley Prize, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1960.

Blackburn’s work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; the British Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia; the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University, University Park; the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Davis Museum at Wellesley College; and the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington.

Morris Blackburn died in Philadelphia on 14 July 1979.