BIO
Maureen Murray (b. Providence, Rhode Island, United States) creates abstract paintings and pastel drawings influenced by her native rural Rhode Island. She holds a BA from Connecticut College in New London, CT, and an MAT from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, and studied at the Art Students League of New York.
She received a Juror’s Award in the American Drawing Biennial at Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, VA, curated by May Stevens, and had her first solo exhibition at Hera Gallery and Educational Foundation, Wakefield, RI, sponsored in part by Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She also created the characters, artwork, and storyline for the animated short film “On the Moon” at Nickelodeon Animation Studios in New York, NY, which screened at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, Chicago, IL, Brooklyn Academy of Music BAMkids Film Festival, Brooklyn, NY, and international venues, including Melbourne International Children’s Film Festival, and later broadcast on Plum TV, New York, NY. Murray’s recent exhibitions include Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; International Society for Performing and Visual Arts, Chicago, IL; a solo exhibition, Teravarna Fine Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and others. Her 2026 exhibitions include SVACE Project Space, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. Murray paints from a century-old boathouse studio on the Thames River in Connecticut. For three decades, she has documented coastal New England ecosystems where forests meet the Atlantic Ocean.
STATEMENT
For three decades, I have inhabited the coastal ecosystems where New England forests meet the Atlantic Ocean. My paintings document what sustained observation reveals: familiar environments becoming unfamiliar as ecological systems destabilize.
I paint observable climate phenomena through lyrical abstraction. Translucent layers accumulate into form, mirroring how environmental transformation manifests—gradual, cumulative, and undeniable. These paintings refuse smoothness: climate transformation is not frictionless. Forms resist solidification, surfaces fragment, creating aesthetic experience that demands engagement rather than offering comfort.
Recent work includes a series documenting seasonal desynchronization: wildflowers blooming at the wrong time, frozen by unseasonable snow, encased in ice. Larger paintings render familiar coves and woodland edges as elegiac visions at moments of disappearance—forms emerging and dissolving simultaneously.
While working on 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 that bypass rational defensiveness. What does climate change feel like? How do we apprehend disappearance while it's happening?
Decades of lived experience in these environments created the foundation for recognizing their transformation. My paintings make the familiar strange enough that we must contend with it anew.
These paintings document what's happening in coastal New England—global patterns manifesting locally, creating felt experience rather than rational argument. This is aesthetic practice generating knowledge that conventional documentation cannot access.
