Elizabeth Murray, One Of America's Preeminent Painters, Joins Brooklyn College As Distinguished Lecturer

   Acclaimed artist Elizabeth Murray, who will have a retrospective showing of her paintings to inaugurate the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art next year, has joined Brooklyn College as a distinguished lecturer in painting.
The appointment of Murray, considered one of the most important postmodernist abstract artists of our time, is the latest in a long line of eminent artists who have made the College's art department one of the most prominent in the United States.

   "Brooklyn College is fortunate to have such an illustrious artist as Elizabeth Murray joining its art department," said President Christoph M. Kimmich. "Her appointment carries on the tradition of the department's remarkable past and ensures that its excellence will continue."
Murray's large, colorful paintings, which break through the traditional boundaries of the two-dimensional canvas to take on eccentric shapes, represent one of the most distinctive, appealing, and successful painting practices in recent years. Janson's History of Art, the world's leading textbook on Western art, notes, "The greatest successes have come from artists who have invested Neo-Abstraction with the personal meaning of Neo-Expressionism. Elizabeth Murray. . .has emerged since 1980 as the leader of this crossover style in America."

Jazz, 2001. 3-dimensional color lithograph (image courtesy Universal Limited Art Editions)

    Murray has exhibited extensively for the past three decades. Her works may be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, the Israel Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others. Among countless honors, she is a 1999 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

   In joining Brooklyn College, Murray follows some of the most renowned artists of the twenty-first century. They have included painters Mark Rothko, Jimmy Ernst, Ad Reinhardt, and Clyfford Still; the photographers Berenice Abbott and Walter Rosenblum; the sculptor Louise Bourgeois; and the father of contemporary etching, Stanley William Hayter.
More recently, the art department has been the home of Philip Pearlstein, Lennart Anderson, Lee Bontecou, Lois Dodd, William T. Williams, and Allan D'Arcangelo.