A FREE SCREENING in collaboration with UB Art Galleries:
Don’t miss EVERYBODY KNOWS…ELIZABETH MURRAY, an inspiring portrait of maverick painter and former Buffalo resident Elizabeth Murray!
Admission is FREE!
Screening 12:00pm this Saturday and Sunday, 9/25 + 9/26.
FREE tickets available HERE.
“A vivid portrait of a unique talent and personality.”
—Film Journal International
“Shows the great variety of Murray’s always vivid, colorful work, and culminates with a triumph not just for Murray but also, as the film takes pains to point out, for women in American art: a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.”
—The New York Times
EVERYBODY KNOWS…ELIZABETH MURRAY is an intimate portrait of the groundbreaking artist Elizabeth Murray that explores the relationship between Murray’s family life and career and reconsiders her place in the contemporary art history. Murray’s personal journals, voiced in the film by Meryl Streep, give viewers a privileged window into Murray’s internal struggles and incredible ambition. Verité footage of Murray in her studio and home videos help round out this profile of her life and exclusive interviews with art world luminaries including Chuck Close, Vija Celmins, Adam Weinberg, Robert Storr, and Roberta Smith provide the historical backdrop for the New York art scene.
Elizabeth Murray moved to New York City in 1967. In 2005, almost forty years later, Murray was the fifth woman to be celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Everybody Knows… Elizabeth Murray traces Murray’s life from her years as a struggling single mother to having a bustling, growing family and thriving career. From her early 1960’s “funk-inflected pop,” to her painterly minimalism in the 70’s, and on to her dynamic fractured canvases of the 1990s and 2000s, Murray worked without hesitation through—and often in spite of—market trends, historical movements and her failing health.
Murray’s paintings defy categorization. She broke convention, and made an indelible imprint on contemporary art. This film chronicles her remarkable journey from an impoverished childhood to artistic maverick, before she lost her life to cancer in 2007. Everybody Knows… Elizabeth Murray cements Murray’s legacy as one of the great painters of our time.
About UB Art Galleries’ ELIZABETH MURRAY: BACK IN TOWN:
JUNE 12 – OCTOBER 3, 2021
UB ANDERSON GALLERY
Exhibit link HERE
This summer the University at Buffalo Art Galleries presents the first major posthumous exhibition of work by pioneering painter Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007). This survey will span both floors of UB Anderson Gallery presenting a fresh look at important themes and motifs of Murray’s five-decade career.
Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town plots Murray’s career chronologically, including paintings, drawings, and prints that reveal how the early, never-before-exhibited works she made while based in the San Francisco Bay area and later in Buffalo, relate to the mature painting style that earned her critical acclaim.
The impact of the two years Murray spent in Buffalo working and teaching at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen) has previously been a footnote in her legendary career and treated as a two-year stopover during her move from San Francisco to New York City. Yet this closer look proves that the Buffalo period didn’t just serve as an extension of her formative years. In Buffalo, as Murray acknowledged herself, her work “changed radically,” setting her on a path to become the bold painter known for her wildly shaped canvases—a mix of abstraction and cartoonish figuration. Fortuitously, this survey coincides with the 55-year anniversary of Murray’s solo exhibition at the Tomac Gallery, an artist-run gallery in Buffalo, which ran continuously from 1965-1969.
Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town is organized by Robert Scalise, Director, UB Art Galleries in partnership with The Murray-Holman Family Trust, New York. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, Charles Balbach, and Kate and Steve Foley.
