Catherine Murphy

Catherine Murphy (born 1946, Cambridge, Massachusetts) is an American realist painter whose career began with the inclusion of her work in the 1971 Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A two-time recipient of the National Endowment of the Arts grant (1979 and 1989), Murphy has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and most recently the Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize in 2013. She was a Senior Critic at Yale University Graduate School of Art for 22 years and is currently the Tepper Family Endowed Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers.

Murphy lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is married to artist Harry Roseman. In interviews she recounts a moment in church when she was about 12. A visiting cardinal asked the children of the congregation if anyone had a vocation. Young Catherine raised her hand and said, "I'm going to be an artist when I grow up."

Growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, Murphy had little exposure to art and visited an art museum for the first time during high school. In interviews Murphy often mentions how drawing and painting were a means to seek control over her world. Murphy studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in 1967, where she was later awarded an honorary doctorate degree in 2006.

Collections

Catherine Murphy's drawings, lithographs and oil paintings are in the following collections. The Art Institute of Chicago Cranbrook Art Museum The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco The Maxine & Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art The Frye Art Museum The Georgia Museum of Art The Greenville County Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Modern Art The Newark Museum The New Jersey State Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum The University of Michigan