Elizabeth Murray
Elizabeth Murray’s (b. 1940, Chicago; d. 2007, Washington County, New York) work blurs the distinction between abstraction and representation, and her shaped canvases and multipart supports challenge traditional conventions of painting. She transformed modernist abstraction by redefining the sculptural dimensions of the medium and exploring layered planes of canvas. Using bold colors and biomorphic forms, figures, and everyday objects, Murray introduced a dynamic sense of movement to her imagery. Murray earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago (1962) and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland (1964). Her work is held in over sixty public collections in the United States, and has been the subject of over eighty solo exhibitions worldwide. Her retrospective, Paintings and Drawings, jointly organized by the Dallas Museum of Art, the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opened in 1987, and traveled to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Des Moines Art Center; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, closing at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1988. In 2005, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a retrospective that traveled to Institut Valencià d’Art Modern in Spain.
Murray was the recipient of numerous academic and institutional honors, including an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (1984), to which she was elected as a member in 1992. She was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Painting, New York (1986), and was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1999).