Illustrator Caleb Morris, who works under the name Sheesh, will open a two-person exhibition at the Robertson Gallery in Mobile beginning December 11, showcasing new work influenced by 19th-century painters and photographers. The show gives Mobile audiences a first look at a body of work the Gulf Coast artist has been building quietly, and it pairs his pieces with a second artist’s work in a format the gallery uses to draw connections between complementary visions.
Morris said he has been drawing since childhood but stepped away from art as a teenager before returning to it seriously about four years ago, developing the style he now works in. The detour, he suggests, was not wasted time. Artists who circle back to the work after years away often bring to it a conviction that lifers lack, and Morris’s path — from childhood sketcher to adult who walked away and came back — has become part of the story his collectors tell about the work.
For the Robertson Gallery show and a related project planned for next year, he said he has been leaning into that historical influence, describing the work as depicting blue-collar workers from the 1800s while touching on universal themes. The imagery borrows the visual language of a century when photography was young and painting carried the weight of documentation: work-worn hands, weathered faces, labor rendered with dignity rather than sentiment.
Smoke and Uncertainty
A companion body of work he is developing centers on smoke and the uncertainty of not knowing what is burning just out of sight. The conceit gives the paintings a tension that pure portraiture cannot: the viewer sees the haze, the glow, the figure reacting, but never the source. It is an idea that translates across contexts, and Morris has leaned into that openness, letting each viewer project their own interpretation onto the frame.
The pairing of antique imagery with modern unease has become a signature of the Sheesh style. Collectors who discovered Morris through streetwear-adjacent illustration and gallery shows alike have followed him through the evolution, and the Robertson exhibition is positioned to introduce that sensibility to a Mobile audience that may know his name from his Mardi Gras work before his gallery work.
A Full-Time Mardi Gras Artist
Beyond gallery work, Morris has spent more than three years as a full-time artist with the Mirth Company, painting Mardi Gras floats year-round. The job is a demanding one by Gulf Coast standards. Float painting means working at scale, in all weather, on a schedule dictated by a season that arrives whether or not the artwork is ready — and it means producing work that will parade past hundreds of thousands of viewers who will see it for seconds at a time.
Mobile’s celebration is the oldest Mardi Gras tradition in the United States, predating New Orleans by years, and the float-building operations that support it are genuine workshops where artists practice a craft handed down across generations. For a working illustrator, the trade offers something studios rarely do: massive surfaces, public audiences and a deadline pressure that sharpens speed without forgiving carelessness.
He said the company considers new artists “the new guy” until they have put in at least five years, meaning he still has time to go before shedding that label. The hierarchy is part of the culture — float artists earn their standing through seasons of work, and the veterans who design and oversee the signature pieces come up through exactly the apprenticeship Morris is navigating now.
Morris, who is based in Gulfport, Mississippi, said he considers home to be wherever his family is and does not stay anchored to one city for long, though he ruled out relocating anywhere too cold. The itinerant streak shows in his resume, which hops between the Gulf Coast, South Florida and Los Angeles within a single season, and in a work ethic built for artists who carry their studio with them.
Other Projects Underway
Alongside the Mobile show, Morris said he has a piece showing at Art Basel in Miami with the Art Whino Gallery, a new partnership with SJC Drums to custom-paint snare drums as part of the company’s Artist Series, and a line of greeting cards for AustinHandmade.com. The spread of projects traces the path of a contemporary illustrator whose work moves fluidly between fine art fairs, product collaborations and accessible print formats without losing its identity.
Art Basel Miami Beach draws galleries, collectors and artists from around the world each December, and a placement there puts Morris’s work in front of the industry’s most concentrated audience of the year. Art Whino, the gallery showing his piece, has built its reputation on discovering artists whose styles cross between street culture and fine art — a lane Morris has occupied throughout his career.
The SJC Drums partnership takes his artwork onto snare drums for the company’s Artist Series, continuing a custom-drum program that pairs the instrument maker with visual artists whose work stands out on stage as much as the drummers playing them. A painted snare is a functional object and a display piece at once, and the commission format has made SJC a favorite of drummers who want gear that looks like nothing else on the riser.
The greeting card line with AustinHandmade.com extends his imagery into the most accessible format an illustrator can offer, putting the Sheesh style into shops and mailboxes at a price point far below gallery work. For artists building an audience, the strategy is deliberate: meet collectors wherever they are, from a $5 card to a fair placement to a drum kit, and let the style carry the thread between them.
Los Angeles and Beyond
He is also part of a group show at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles in January. The gallery is a fixture of the pop-culture art world, known for themed exhibitions that draw entertainment-industry collectors and lines around the block on opening nights, and a slot in one of its group shows is a rite of passage for illustrators working at the intersection of art and fandom. That placement, coming a month after the Mobile debut, will carry Morris’s new bodies of work to a coast where the audience for them is already established.
Stacked together, the winter schedule amounts to a coming-out season for the artist: a gallery debut in Mobile, a Basel placement in Miami, a product launch with a drum maker, a card line, and a Los Angeles group show in the space of a few months. For an artist who returned to drawing seriously four years ago, the pace is a measure of how quickly the work has traveled since.
What Mobile Audiences Will See
The Robertson Gallery exhibition opens December 11 in Mobile, and the two-person format should give visitors a conversation rather than a survey. Morris’s 19th-century-inspired laborers and smoke paintings will hang beside another artist’s work, inviting comparisons across technique and subject, and the gallery’s December timing puts the show squarely in Mobile’s busiest cultural stretch, when holiday crowds and Mardi Gras anticipation both fill the city’s art spaces.
For Morris, the Mobile opening is also a homecoming of sorts — a chance to show work in the region where his year-round float painting has already made him a familiar name to Mardi Gras society members and parade watchers. The gallery audience and the parade audience are different crowds, but they are about to see the same hand, and the artist says that is precisely the point of a season like this one.
Doors open December 11 at the Robertson Gallery in Mobile, with both artists’ work on view through the gallery’s exhibition run. Collectors and the curious alike will find a painter pulling from the 1800s, working comfortably in the present, and still — by his company’s reckoning — the new guy, with everything ahead of him.
Learning the Float Trade
The Mirth Company’s year-round rhythm is what surprises most outsiders to the Mardi Gras world. While the public sees a season that peaks in the weeks before Lent, the workshops behind it never stop: parade themes are designed months ahead, floats are sanded and primed and painted in rotation, and the artists who staff those barns treat each winter’s reveal as the deadline for a full year of labor. Morris’s three-plus years inside that cycle have made him fluent in a scale of painting that studio work rarely demands.
The craft also demands versatility. A float artist might render a company’s logo in the morning, a mythological figure in the afternoon and a caricature of a parade icon before quitting time, matching established house styles while leaving room for individual flourish. Veterans describe the work as illustration at architectural scale, and the artists who thrive in it tend to be the ones who can draw anything, fast — a description that fits an illustrator who built his name on range.
The Two-Person Show Format
Gallery pairings like the Robertson show’s work by contrast. When two artists share a room, each body of work frames the other: shared themes surface, differences sharpen, and visitors move between walls building the connection themselves. Curators favor the format for emerging artists in particular, since a paired debut lets a newcomer’s work be read against an established voice rather than in isolation.
For Mobile’s art scene, the December calendar makes the show a notable addition. The city’s gallery district has grown alongside its downtown revival, and seasonal openings draw a mix of established collectors and first-time visitors who wander in between holiday events. A show that pairs historical imagery with contemporary unease lands well in that setting — accessible enough for a casual crowd, layered enough for the serious ones.
Morris’s plan for next year’s related project remains under wraps, but its direction is clear from the work itself: deeper into the historical register, further into the smoke, and — if the past four years are any guide — into formats no one has thought to hand him yet. Mobile gets the first look on December 11.