Elizabeth Murray attended Mills College and the Art Institute of Chicago where she earned her BFA .She is a pioneer in the world of painting, especially when painting was pretty much dead as a medium in the 1960s and 70s. She injected “life into domestic subject matter, Murray’s paintings often include images of cups, drawers, utensils, chairs, and tables.” “Her art relates to the beginning of women in the arts when women were using aspects of women’s traditional culture to express their creativity. She utilizes domestic objects as the subject of her paintings because it is where she began as a person during the time when women were very much “supposed to be in the kitchen”.
Painting throughout history has dominated by mostly men. In the mid to late 1500s, women started to gain recognition in the this medium. However, women painters really began to gain steam in the 1800s when Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and Angelica Kauffmann came in to view. Vigee-Lebrun earned almost a million francs by 35. One of the most notable of the 1800s was Mary Cassat, who still reigns today as one of the most respected women artists. Sonia Delaunay and Georgia O’Keeffe were more women artists, who were quite notable in the 1900s. Into the mid 19th and early 20th century Lee Krasner, Hanna Hoch and Nataliia Gonocharova are most esteemed.
She continually broke the rectangular mold for paintings and frequently used clouds and lightning shapes canvases to paint on.“Ms. Murray belonged to a sprawling generation of Post-Minimal artists who spent the 1970s reversing the reductivist tendencies of Minimalism and reinvigorating art with a sense of narrative, process and personal identity.
IDIOPATHIC ART 