ELIZABETH MURRAY (1940-2007)

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. As a student, she was influenced by painters ranging from Cezanne to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

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. She is particularly noted for her shaped canvas paintings

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

In 2006, her 40-year career was honored at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). 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))

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. 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." 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.