Elizabeth Murray (American, b. 1940 - d. 2007)

Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago) received a B.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago (1962) and an M.F.A. from Mills College in Oakland, CA (1964). In addition to her current teaching position at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), Murray has held visiting faculty appointments at a number of American colleges and universities including The Art Institute of Chicago, California Institute of the Arts, Princeton University, Yale University, the School of Visual Arts, New York, and the New York Studio School. She has been awarded degrees from her alma mater, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Honorary Doctorate, 1992), Rhode Island School of Design (Honorary Degree, 1993) and the New School University (Honorary Doctorate, 2001). Murray has also received the Walter M. Campana Award from the Art Institute of Chicago (1982), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1984), the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (1986), the Larry Aldrich Prize in Contemporary Art (1993), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (1999), and has been honored by Artists Space, New York (2001). In 1992 Murray became a member of the American Institute of Arts and Letters, New York. Murray and her husband, poet Bob Holman, were honored in June 2002 by the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado with its National Artist Award.

Murray's work has been the subject of nearly sixty solo exhibitions in galleries around the world since her New York City debut in the 1972 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art and has participated in six Whitney Biennial exhibitions since 1973. Murray first exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1974 and joined PaceWildenstein in 1995. In 1987-88 the Dallas Museum of Art, the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston jointly organized a major retrospective exhibition of Murray's paintings and drawings that later traveled to The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Des Moines Art Center, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 1988 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibited Elizabeth Murray: New Work, and in 1991-92 the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH exhibited Recent Work by Elizabeth Murray. Last summer the Jaffe-Friede & Strauss Galleries at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH exhibited Elizabeth Murray Paintings and Works on Paper. The Museum of Modern Art in New York invited Murray to curate Artist's Choice-- Elizabeth Murray: Modern Women in 1995 following her inclusion a few years prior in MoMA's 1990-91 High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.

Elizabeth Murray's work can be found in over forty public collections in the United States, including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Baltimore Museum of Art; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Cleveland Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Saint Louis Art Museum; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.