Ree Morton (August 3, 1936 – April 30, 1977) was an American visual artist who was closely associated with the postminimalist and feminist art movements of the 1970s.

Ree Morton was born on August 3, 1936, in Ossining, New York. A mother of three and the former wife of a navy officer, Morton lived a relatively nomadic life and began her artistic practice as a hobby through drawing. She decided to become a full-time artist in the late 1960s, receiving a BFA from the University of Rhode Island in 1968 and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 1970.

Morton worked in a variety of mediums including sculpture, drawing and installation. Morton deployed "confrontational innocence," as described by art historian Lucy Lippard, and humor in her sculptures that referenced everyday decorative forms such as curtains, ruffles and swags. Morton self-described her work as "light and ironic on serious subjects without frivolity." Her piece Bake Sale (1974), for instance, was spurred on by a male faculty member at the Philadelphia College of Art who suggested that women on the faculty should stick to bake sales. Formally, Bake Sale (which features a comically low table covered with cakes and pastries against a wall of Celastic bows) typifies the playful interrelationships of objects Morton sought to create in her work.

Curator Marcia Tucker describes Morton's work as "unusual in its totality; it incorporates painting, sculpture, real and crafted objects, natural and artificial materials. The work is intelligent without being intellectual, narrative without being literary and ironic without being whimsical. Its multiplicity, contradictory and slightly perverse nature, its response to natural forms and its sources in primitive human phenomena result in a unique sculptural mode." Morton's art frequently combined an interest in poetry, language, and semiotics.

Though she mostly received attention for her sculptural work during her lifetime, Morton continued to draw, write and sketch throughout her career. Morton died at the age of 40 in a car accident in Chicago, Illinois on April 30, 1977.

From July 21 to August 17, 1976, Ree Morton participated in the residency program at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. Her work there was created around the natural beauty and the history of the site involving both painting and landscape. She developed two works during the residency, Regarding Landscape, and The Maid of the Mist.

In Regarding Landscape, Morton utilized a pre-existing wall in front of a waterfall along the Upper Gorge Trail. There she started by decorating the wall with arches, drapery, roses, and streamers. In her statement in the Artpark Visual Arts Program catalog, Morton specified that her intention was, “to increase the theatrical, dramatic quality already present at the site; to make the location as much like a diorama as possible.” The second part of this piece was to glue paintings of various shots of the landscape onto surrounding rocks, bordered by a colorful frame. The idea for this was for the paintings to be juxtaposed to the actual landscape that it references.

For Maid of the Mist, Morton painted a thirty-five-foot ladder yellow and decorated it with Celastic ribbons and roses and incorporated two life preservers decorated with flowers and streamers into the event as well. The ladder was placed on the hill, going into the water, with one life preserver in the water tied to the shore and another tied to Morton's waist. She cut the rope connecting the life preserver floating in the water and released it into the current. This piece directly references the legend of the Maid of the Mist, where a maiden was sent over the falls as a bride to the Niagara River. Morton refers to The Maid of the Mist as both a “symbolic rescue” and a “memorial event”.