Early life
Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States to Irish-Catholic parents. Her father was a lawyer and her mother aspired to be a commercial artist. She encouraged her daughter to paint and with the help of her high school art teacher Murray entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1958 and graduated with a BFA in 1962. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Mills College in 1964.mills.edu Notable GraduatesCareer
She taught art at Daemen College from 1965 to 1967. In 1967, Murray moved to New York City. She 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), an oil on canvas painting evoking human characteristics, personalities, or pure feeling through an interaction of non-figurative shapes, colour and lines. She is particularly noted for her shaped canvas paintings.Kimmelman, Michael (October 21, 2005Awards and honors
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. In 1999, Murray was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. This grant led directly to opening of the Bowery Poetry Club, a Lower East Side performance arts venue run by her husband, Bob Holman.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. . In 2006, her 40-year career was honored at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).Exhibition: Elizabeth Murray, October 23, 2005–January 6, 2006Personal life
Murray married sculptor Don Sunseri in 1963 in San Francisco. Murray and Sunseri had met three years prior at the Art Institute of Chicago. Among the guests at their wedding was Murray's close friend and fellow artist, Jennifer Bartlett. Murray and Sunseri had one son together, Dakota Sunseri, before they eventually divorced. Murray was later married to poet and poetry activist Bob Holman, whom she met in 1980. They had two children, daughters Sophia Murray Holman and Daisy Murray Holman. The couple remained together, splitting time between New York City and their farm in Washington County, New York, until Murray's death.Death
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..." The Bowery Poetry Club held a Praise Day in her honor on August 30, 2007, with artists Brice Marden and Joel Shapiro, writers Jessica Hagedorn and Patricia Spears Jones, and choreographers Elizabeth Streb and Yoshiko Chuma among the attendees; ''Artforum'' described the event as "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."Remembering MurrayLegacy: art and feminism
After Murray's death, the A. G. Foundation, Columbia University, and the Archives of American Art established the "Elizabeth Murray Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts Project," to honor her memory. The A. G. Foundation's Agnes Gund said of her,"It seems so right to honor Elizabeth Murray by archiving the lives, the thoughts, the dreams and goals of other women who—like herself—persisted in the visual arts, extending and enriching the world through their work," said the A. G. Foundation's Agnes Gund.
Film
''Everybody Knows...Elizabeth Murray'', a film by Kristi Zea, exploring Murray's life and work, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.References
Bibliography
* Elizabeth Murray; Francine Prose; PaceWildenstein (FirmExternal links