Elizabeth Murray (artist)
| Elizabeth Murray | |
|---|---|
 "Wiggle Manhattan", lithograph, 1992, Museum of Modern Art |
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| Born | September 6, 1940 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died | August 12, 2007 (aged 66) |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Painting, printmaking |
| Training | School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mills College. |
Elizabeth Murray (September 6, 1940 – August 12, 2007)[1] was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art,[2] the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,[3] and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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[edit] Life and work
Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Murray graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1958-1962. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Mills College in 1964.[4] As a student, she was influenced by painters ranging from Cezanne to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.[5]
In 1967, Murray moved to New York, and first exhibited in 1971 in the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibition. One of her first mature works included "Children Meeting," 1978 (now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, New York), an oil on canvas painting evoking human characteristics, personalities, or pure feeling through an interaction of non-figurative shapes, colour and lines.[5] She is particularly noted for her shaped canvas paintings.[6]
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.[7] In 1999, Murray was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.[8] This grant led directly to opening of the Bowery Poetry Club, a Lower East Side performance arts venue run by her husband, Bob Holman.[9]
In 2006, her 40-year career was honored at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).[10] The retrospective was widely praised, with the New York Times noting that by the end of the exhibition, "You're left with the sense of an artist in the flush of her authority and still digging deep."[10] As of 2008, Murray is only one of four women artists to have had a retrospective at the MoMA (the other three are Louise Bourgeois (in 1982), Lee Krasner (in 1984), and Helen Frankenthaler (in 1989)).[11]
In 2007, Murray died of lung cancer. In her obituary, the New York Times wrote that Murray "reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself..."[12]
The Bowery Poetry Club held a Praise Day in her honor on August 30, 2007. Art Forum would write that the event "provided a blend of the poignant and the comic that threatened to bring it closer to a Saturday Night Live skit shredding avant-garde performance practice than an actual art-world remembrance." [13] In attendance were artists Brice Marden and Joel Shapiro, writers Jessica Hagedorn and Patricia Spears Jones, and choreographers Elizabeth Streb and Yoshiko Chuma.
A second private memorial was held at the Museum of Modern Art later that fall.
Murray was survived by her husband, Bob Holman, and three children: daughters Sophia Murray Holman and Daisy Murray Holman, and son Dakota Sunseri.[12]
The Murray-Holman Family Trust is represented by The Pace Gallery, New York.
[edit] References
- ^ "Elizabeth R. Murray". Social Security Death Index. New England Historic Genealogical Society. http://www.americanancestors.org/PageDetail.aspx?recordId=105168048. Retrieved 17 March 2011.
- ^ moma.org
- ^ artcyclopedia.com
- ^ mills.edu
- ^ a b Grove Dictionary of Art, Macmillan Publishers, 1996, ISBN 1-884446-00-0
- ^ New York Times "ART REVIEW; Stirring Up a Commotion on Canvas" October 21, 2005
- ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter M". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterM.pdf. Retrieved 10 April 2011.
- ^ infoplease.com
- ^ Aptowicz, Cristin O'Keefe. (2008). Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam. "CHAPTER 26: What the Heck Is Going On Here; The Bowery Poetry Club Opens (Kinda) for Business." Soft Skull Press. ISBN 1-933-36882-9.
- ^ a b http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2005/murray.html MoMa's Elizabeth Murray exhibition
- ^ New York Times "A Visit With the Modern's First Grandmother" By CAROL KINO. Published: October 2, 2005.
- ^ a b Smith, Roberta. "Elizabeth Murray, 66, Artist of Vivid Forms, Dies", The New York Times, 13 August 2007. Retrieved 16 April 2008.
- ^ http://artforum.com/diary/id=15778#readon15778 Art Forum "Remembering Murray"
[edit] Bibliography
- Elizabeth Murray; Francine Prose; PaceWildenstein (Firm) Elizabeth Murray: paintings 1999-2003: March 7-April 19, 2003 (New York, N.Y.: PaceWildenstein, 2003) ISBN 1930743246
- Robert Storr; Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) Elizabeth Murray (New York: Museum of Modern Art; London: Thames & Hudson [distributor], 2005) ISBN 0870704931
- Elizabeth Murray: Drawings, 1980-1986 (exhibition catalogue, Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie-Mellon U.A.G. 1986)
- Elizabeth Murray: Paintings and Drawings (exhibition catalogue, Dallas, TX, Museum A, and elsewhere, 1987)
[edit] External links
- Elizabeth Murray on ARTINFO
- The Pace Gallery
- Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBS series Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century - Season 2 (2003).
- Askart.com page on Elizabeth Murray, with COLOR IMAGES
- MTA Arts for Transit page on Elizabeth Murray's large-scale glass mosaic mural, Blooming, 1996
- MTA Arts for Transit page on Elizabeth Murray's large-scale glass mosaic mural, Stream, 2001
- American printmakers
- American painters
- MacArthur Fellows
- Artists from New York City
- School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
- People from Chicago, Illinois
- People from Manhattan
- American women artists
- Contemporary painters
- Deaths from lung cancer
- 1940 births
- 2007 deaths
- Rome Prize winners
- Women painters
- Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
