BIO
Maureen Murray (b. Providence, Rhode Island) makes abstract paintings of the coastal ecosystems where New England forests meet the Atlantic, familiar environments destabilizing under climate change. She works in translucent layers of oil. She holds a BA from Connecticut College in New London, CT, where she studied with Barkley Hendricks, and an MAT from Rhode Island School of Design. At the Art Students League of New York, she was a monitor (studio assistant) in Rudolf Baranik's advanced critique seminar.
Murray's work was selected for the 60th Annual Juried Competition at the Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA, juried by Jovanna Venegas, then Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the American Drawing Biennial at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, VA, she shared a Juror's Award selected by May Stevens. Her solo exhibition New Works was presented at Hera Gallery and Educational Foundation, Wakefield, RI, sponsored in part by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.
Murray also created the characters, artwork, and story for the animated short On the Moon, developed at Nick Jr. and screened at the BAMkids Film Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her recent exhibitions include SVACE Project Space, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY; the International Society for Performing and Visual Arts, Chicago, IL; and Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT, among others. She is a 2026 virtual resident at Pollinator, nominated by Assets for Artists, and a member of the ArtEO R&D Community, London, UK.
Murray grew up in a rural Rhode Island coastal town, where she now lives, and paints from a historic boathouse studio on the Thames River in New London, Connecticut.
STATEMENT
I paint the coastal ecosystems where New England forests meet the Atlantic. My paintings document familiar environments becoming unfamiliar as ecological systems destabilize. These are observable climate phenomena, rendered through lyrical abstraction.
I track when things happen on this shoreline — when a wildflower blooms, when the birds arrive, when the leaves turn — and how that timing has shifted. Ecologists call this phenology. I paint from those records and from repeated observation of the same sites, rather than from a single view.
Recent work includes a series on seasonal desynchronization: wildflowers blooming at the wrong time, then frozen by unseasonable snow and encased in ice. Larger paintings render familiar coves and woodland edges as elegiac visions at moments of disappearance, forms emerging and dissolving simultaneously. Translucent layers accumulate into form, mirroring how environmental transformation manifests: gradual, cumulative, undeniable. Forms resist solidification and surfaces fragment.
Working in climate communication, I recognized the gap between what climate science revealed and what existing visual languages could convey. My response was to create aesthetic experiences of transformation. What does climate change feel like? How do we apprehend disappearance while it's happening?
I have been observing these environments for decades. This is aesthetic practice generating knowledge that conventional documentation cannot access. My paintings make the familiar strange enough that we must contend with it anew.
