Two more days until I hit 100 paintings…wow and whew.  Today is day 98 and it was another summer-like day.  Too bad I’m feeling crampy and hormonal today.  Painting today’s artist was bright and colorful though!  Join me in celebrating Elizabeth Murray today.

Elizabeth Murray (September 6, 1940 – August 12, 2007) 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, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

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 Cézanne 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.” As of 2008, Murray was 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 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. 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.”  In attendance were artists Brice Marden andJoel 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.

Biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my tribute to Elizabeth Murray.  I didn’t want to think too much as I drew out what I was going to paint today.  I just let the images flow from my mind.  It was fun and also more challenging than I thought it would be…I think that’s the one lesson I’ve been learning more and more with this year challenge!

Enjoy and I will see you tomorrow on Day 99.  Best, Linda