Elizabeth Murray 1982: An Interview

Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007)  was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman.  She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (1958–62) and at Mills College, Oakland, CA (1962–4). Elizabeth Murray’s paintings have been referred to as “dandyish abstraction.” Her work is distinctive in its use of color, shape, and surface to evoke human characteristics, personalities or humor. Murray is particularly well known for her shaped canvases, which date from 1976, on to which are painted both figurative and non-figurative elements.

“I think that there’s been so much repression in the name of issues. And there always have been in terms of art... But I felt at that moment that I wasn’t involved with issues very, very strongly—that the issues were being taken care of by other people... I was much more interested in taking all the stuff that I knew and all the kinds of beautiful potentials of abstraction and making it into something very personal,” Murray says in this interview with Kate Horsfield.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1982 and re-edited in 2003 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.