Meghan Murray

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Meghan Murray (b. 1994, Massachusetts), featured in AQ Volume VII, is an artist, administrator, and educator based just outside of Boston, MA. Murray received her BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College and her MFA in Painting from Boston University. Her representational painting practice embodies and simultaneously intervenes upon historical tradition, both in process and in subject. Murray’s most recent work is a continued investigation into intergenerational American ideals and clichés as viewed in the mid-century family photo album. Her paintings have been on view at such spaces as Abigail Ogilvy (Boston), Morgan Lehman (NYC), Attleboro Art Museum, Boston University’s Sloane House, and virtually with newcube art through Future Fairs. She is a recipient of the 2022 Blanche E. Colman Award for New England artists and was awarded second place in the 2023 Miami University Young Painters competition by juror John Yau.


Artist Statement

I am a painter and collector. The research lens of my artistic practice surveys an archive sourced from functionally anonymous marketplaces including eBay. I select and categorize photographs according to the patterns evidenced in candid images from an expansive but nameless photo album: birthday parties, costumes, and domestic spaces appear in a rhythm so constant they become kitsch. By then studying, arranging, scaling, and elevating these found snapshots into oil paintings, I make work that responds to the tension between real histories and clichés of white suburbia in mid- to late-20th-century America.

The family photo album preserves an element of storytelling and intimacy. When those same images are removed from their context through death, time, or commerce and mediated by painting, what shifts? Is the narrative lost, the memory dissolved? I translate the indexical mark of amateur photography—the flash-shadow-color cast—and all the “truth” that it bears into a simulated gesture. Through painting, in its immense histories and material practices, I aim to turn the ephemeral to the indelible, the vernacular to the formal.

The works therefore inhabit a space of also/too: that a memory can be a precious individual and simultaneously a reflection of an uncanny monoculture. The resulting works are paintings about photographic objects and the archive, the romanticization of American myths, child socialization, gender idealism, and the manner in which they are perpetuated into a national identity.


Visit Meghan Murray’s website