Review (via Buffalo News): Rediscovering Elizabeth Murray through a Buffalo lens

Elizabeth Murray is shown in 1965 in the backyard of her home and artist studio at 77 Woodlawn Ave., near Michigan Avenue, where she lived for two years. Photograph by Don Sunseri. Thanks to the Murray-Holman Family Trust/Artists Rights Society, New York. 

Image courtesy of Don Sunseri/Murray-Holman Family Trust

Originally published by Buffalo News
By Mark Sommer

The two academic years abstract painter Elizabeth Murray spent in the late-1960s as a college instructor in Buffalo has long been seen as a blip on her artistic timeline between Oakland and New York City.

It also hasn't helped that little of the art Murray produced during that time survived. Much of it was left on the curb outside her Masten Park rowhouse for the sanitation truck and scavengers to pick up, days before she moved away.

But, as Robert Scalise, the director of UB Art Galleries came to discover, Murray's time in Buffalo was a formative period of artistic growth and experimentation. It also set the stage for the critical acclaim she would later receive for her unconventionally shaped canvases and cartoonish figuration.

Murray's last major show occurred in 2005, two years before her death, when she was just the fifth woman artist to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

In her first posthumous retrospective, Scalise has curated "Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town" to focus on how Murray's time in Buffalo shaped her artistic style. The exhibition is on display through Oct. 3 at UB Anderson Gallery.

With the Albright-Knox Art Gallery closed for renovations, this survey of Murray's work and new scholarship on the impact Buffalo had on her career has "must-see" written all over it for museum-goers with an affinity for modern and contemporary art.

"Bringing an exhibition of Elizabeth Murray's work to Buffalo has long been a dream of mine," Scalise said.

The gallery director put the show together with help from the Murray estate, access to records of Murray's work that no longer exist and generous loans from other museums and private collectors.

The exhibition includes 71 pieces, with all but one of the show's 21 paintings on the first floor and drawings and prints on the second. It spans the period, chronologically, from 1963, which includes the never-before exhibited painting, "Portrait of Einstein & Charles Proteus Steinmetz," to Murray's last work, "Everybody Knows," in 2007.

An artist timeline and list of exhibitions are also included.