Todd Murphy (1962-2020), American experimental artist distinguished for his exceptional utilization of materials—found, natural, and technological—to fashion immersive experiential environments, transcending scales from monumental to microscopic.
Tod — Todd Murphy (1962-2020), American experimental artist distinguished for his exceptional utilization of materials—found, natural, and technological—to fashion immersive experiential environments, transcending scales from monumental to microscopic. Todd Murphy in his studio, 1992 Artist studio portrait photographed by Daemon Baizan/DAEMONpictures www.DAEMONpictures.com

It's the idea of the infinite with in the finite - the comfort in recognizing that physics/science/art all are about asking questions.

TODD MURPHY (1962-2020)
Wide Awake at the Mattress Factory, intebview by Regan Hofmann
Poets, Artists & Madmen, July 1995
Do you know anything about fractals? You take something finite, like a shoreline. You measure it with a yardstick - end over end. It measures 700 yards. Then you remeasure ti with a flexible tape, that can pick up the undulations. It measures 850 yards. You keep measuring it and it just keeps getting longer. It's this idea of the infinite within the finite - the comfort in recognizing that physics/science/art all are about asking questions

TODD MURPHY (1962-2020)
Wide Awake at the Mattress Factory, by Regan Hofmann
Poets, Artists & Madmen, July 1995

TODD MURPHY ARTIST CHARLOTTESVILLE STUDIO BROOKLYN AND ATLANTA AND NEW YORK NEW YORK.jpg

Todd Murphy (1962-2020), American experimental artist distinguished for his extraordinary use of materials—found, natural, and technological—to fashion immersive experiential environments, transcending scales from monumental to microscopic.

Murphy lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY, Charlottesville, VA and Atlanta, Ga. born July 28, 1962 in Chicago, IL and died February 3, 2020 in New York, NY.

“Ultimately, what distinguishes Murphy from most of his American contemporaries is his commitment to the human- not the American—condition.”

Bradford R. Collins
Todd Murphy's Heroic Subjectivism
McKissick Museum Catalog, Columbia, SC, January 13, 1991
"I visited Murphy at his studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and have never been so moved by an artist working Space."

Adam Lehrer, 2016
Artist Todd Murphy Creates Discourse through Beauty
Forbes Magazine. October 21, 2016.
“I have been back to Murphy's studio many times over the ensuing years, first in Atlanta and more recently near Charlottesville,Virginia. Each time, I have left with a sense of haunted remembrance and enigmatic drama."

Carrie Przybilla
The High Museum of Art, 2000
organizing curator TODD MURPHY Art at the Edge
“Murphy’s fixation on racism and the misuse of science, manifested since early in his career, proved not simply precocious, but prescient:"

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles 2022
“Murphy’s fixation on racism and the misuse of science, manifested since early in his career, proved not simply precocious, but prescient: he mirrored the concerns of African American counterparts, one of the few non-Black artists of the time to address the issue, but envisioned those concerns in terms of poetic elision more than documentary narrative."

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles 2022

Todd Murphy, Portrait by Adam Lehrer, Forbes Interview, 2016

Todd's studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, March 2016

Photograph of Todd's Studio by Dot Griffith for Atlanta at Home by Frances Schultz ©1994

"Art is not about the right color on the right surface; it's about synthesizing one's experience."

Todd Murphy, 1989
Yet the informal calligraphy seems to further support and identify with the single figure in a context that feels as primordial as the drawings on the walls of the ancient caves and, at the same time, as sophisticated and timely as a billboard

Joseph Perrin
The Art World/ The Work of Todd Murphy, 1989
Joseph Samuel Perrin (1923 - 2014) Professor Emeritus, and the founder and former Chairman of the School of Art and Design at Georgia State University,

Oh, that sculptors could paint paintings as well as he makes sculptures. In every one of these 13 pieces, the tactile sensations come with an evocation of what one should call "The Poetics of Decay," the beauty of objects and substances, "the antique," whose active lives have ended, but which still live on in the imagination of the artist.

Donald Locke
A World Apart Todd Murphy’s New World
Fay Gold Gallery, 1995
Donald Locke (1930 – 2010) painter, sculptor, ceramicist and writer, lived, studied and worked in Guyana, Britain and the USA. Donalde Locke
They are then chopped up, re-assembled with heads, bodies and torsos freely interchanged, and then partially covered with common salt mixed with an adhesive. They emerge as radically re-figured beings. Sounds like a project in Three Dimensional Design 102, doesn't it? But this is no rookie artist. He invests each newly fashioned sculpture with an eerie tactility

Donald Locke
A World Apart Todd Murphy’s New World
Fay Gold Gallery, 1995
Donald Locke (1930 – 2010) painter, sculptor, ceramicist and writer, lived, studied and worked in Guyana, Britain and the USA. Donalde Locke
Simply described, they are made from found objects, from fabrics, dolls and wooden sculptures from Africa, Indonesia and here in the U.S. All this material is taken in to that vast, echoing, heroic mausoleum Todd Murphy calls his studio.

Donald Locke
A World Apart Todd Murphy’s New World
Fay Gold Gallery, 1995
Donald Locke (1930 – 2010) painter, sculptor, ceramicist and writer, lived, studied and worked in Guyana, Britain and the USA. Donald Locke

Art at the Edge_Boy looks East 1995_007.jpg

“I have been back to Murphy's studio many times over the ensuing years, first in Atlanta and more recently near Charlottesville,Virginia. Each time, I have left with a sense of haunted remembrance and enigmatic drama."

Carrie Przybilla
The High Museum of Art, 2000
organizing curator TODD MURPHY Art at the Edge
"I visited Murphy at his studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and have never been so moved by an artist working Space."

Adam Lehrer
Artist Todd Murphy Creates Discourse through Beauty
Forbes Magazine, Adam Lehrer, October 21, 2016.

Monument to Sally Hemings

Charlottesville, Virginia, 2000 more on this work HERE

It has endurance and frailty built into its structure—its story is not one of event but of duration and of the duration of difference in the narration of human genetic material, material structures, built space, and urban design and development.

Samantha Pinto
INFAMOUS BODIES
Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights. “The Romance Of Consent Sally Hemings, Black Women’s Sexuality, And The Fundamental Vulnerability Of Rights”
Duke University Press, 2020
Murphy’s piece is then both historical and counter historical.

Samantha Pinto
INFAMOUS BODIES
Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights. “The Romance Of Consent Sally Hemings, Black Women’s Sexuality, And The Fundamental Vulnerability Of Rights”
Duke University Press, 2020

Murphy’s fixation on racism and the misuse of science, manifested since early in his career, proved not simply precocious, but prescient: he mirrored the concerns of African American counterparts, one of the few non-Black artists of the time to address the issue, but envisioned those concerns in terms of poetic elision more than documentary narrative.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles 2022
Certain themes connected certain series; for instance, Murphy tacitly condemned the historical institution of slavery in America in the billowing white dresses that float through his “Murmurations” (as well as earlier work) – the dresses, already loaded with cultural and metaphorical suggestion, conjure the fate of chatteled African women, and the series both sources and culminates in a monument to Sally Hemings, who “belonged” to Thomas Jefferson (in more ways than one, bearing him several children).

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles 2022
In a subsequent series, “Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Radio,” Murphy looked at the more general racism that inheres to anthropology even as he examined the scientistic tendency to denote, classify, and display.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles 2022
What was supposed to be a stable and logical way of communicating and improving knowledge, Murphy indicates, amplified and perpetuated stereotypes: biology was – and very much remains -- as much a weapon of suppression as a tool of enlightenment.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles 2022

The Courage Of Margaret Meade, 2000/ 2015

I read a great quote by Goethe. I’m going to misquote him but it goes something like this, “anyone who can’t synthesize three thousand years of civilization is living hand to mouth.”

TODD MURPHY
Murphy’s Proof interview by Cathleen Sloan
C-ville Weekly, 1997
I am not afraid to reference antiquity or old masters.

TODD MURPHY
Murphy’s Proof interview by Cathleen Sloan
C-ville Weekly, 1997
When I say there is nothing new I mean we have been struggling with the nature of God for as long as we've been able to conceive that idea.

TODD MURPHY
Murphy’s Proof interview by Cathleen Sloan
C-ville Weekly, 1997
We've been trying to come to terms with the division of the soul and this apparatus, the body.

TODD MURPHY
Murphy’s Proof interview by Cathleen Sloan
C-ville Weekly, 1997

I try to make my art approachable. The average person not interested in art can appreciate my work for its beauty. Someone deeper into art can see the different layers.

TODD MURPHY
FORBES INTERVIEW 2016

Fresco, 2008
Ceiling Mural, — Fresco, 2008 Ceiling Mural,

Duck painting, 2018
Digital composite 15 x 60 Left Photo Composite — Duck painting, 2018 Digital composite 15 x 60 Left Photo Composite

Duck painting, 2018
15 x 60 feet Right side digital photo composite — Duck painting, 2018 15 x 60 feet Right side digital photo composite

What’s outdated is how art has rendered itself irrelevant to most people. It’s like being a musician making music so cacophonous that very few people want to listen to it. Do you know how risky it is to make something beautiful at this point? Even to make something aesthetic, that’s not performative or conceptual? It’s very challenging.

TODD MURPHY
FORBES INTERVIEW 2016
A structural element that is virtually always included in Murphy's paintings is "writing," which he uses to symbolize his thoughts about the human condition and art. The words may simply be notes to himself or they may be from any source that is available if the message seems cogent. They may even be written in Russian. Among the words that may appear on some of his canvases is "ARNT”. This play on the contraction "aren't," he explains, "is for me a negation of what art has become."

Joseph Perrin
The Art World/ The Work of Todd Murphy, 1989
Joseph Samuel Perrin (1923 - 2014) ARTIST, Professor Emeritus, and the founder and former Chairman of the School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.
THIS QUOTE IS ABOUT THE ART WORLD IN GENERAL AND IS NOT AN ARTICLE THAT MENTIONS TODD MURPHY. IT IS AN ARTICLE THAT I FELL SPEAKS TO TODD'S TRAJECTORY AND HIGHLIGHTS A MOVEMENT HE WAS PART OF AS EARLY AS 1989. “We see subjectivity, something like ethics, responsibility, the social contract, personal obsession, and earnest attempts to communicate again with less insider-y audiences. Rather than plotting where this art fits on the teleological-formalist timeline, consider Romanesque and medieval church façades: These masterpieces tell essential stories in visually sophisticated, visionary ways, all with an extraordinary use of material, scale, ambition, everything, yet anyone may experience, read, grasp, and be part of this art. They are open books. These are the connotations and possibilities of art now. Art has landed on another moon.”

Jerry Saltz Vulture October, 2019

ToddMurphy_Studio_ Monument to Sally Hemmings_003__WF.jpeg

“Todd Murphy’s Gesamtkunstwerk required not things to say so much as ways to say them, and the arc of his art takes us from declaration to account to poem.”

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles, 2022

“Throughout his career Murphy was cited time and again as a “storyteller” and a “narrative artist.” But he never told his stories in a straightforward pictorial (much less illustrative) manner; and by time he left the South he had evolved into a kind of image-poet, inferring ideas at least as much as spinning or elaborating on tales.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles, 2022
More and more, the tone and texture of his imagery became characters themselves, even as Murphy’s purview maintained its epic proportions

Peter Frank, 2022
It wasn’t so much that he was assuming the mantle of a bard; in fact, he was always nearing that galvanizing position but always steering clear of its full implications.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles, 2022
Rather, Murphy was looking for a lyric voice, the lyric voice that kept breaking through the surface until he found the chiaroscuro, visual and spiritual, that could fully liberate it.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles, 2022
Todd Murphy’s Gesamtkunstwerk required not things to say so much as ways to say them, and the arc of his art takes us from declaration to account to poem.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles, 2022
Had he been able to give us another 20-30 years of work, Murphy would have found his way to music, too. As it is, his every artwork is a breaking into song -- into the soul of a song, and into a song of the soul

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Los Angeles, 2022

Link to Department of Botanical and Biological Studies---- Coastal Botanicals

Link to see botanical and biological studies

Link to see Department of Botanical and Biological Studies

Todd Murphy Portfolio. Link to portfolios on images.

Cloud Hover
Light Dancing — Cloud Hover Light Dancing

Bird Room Black and White Triptych
The Courage of Margaret Mead — Bird Room Black and White Triptych The Courage of Margaret Mead

Bird Room Triptych
The Courage of Margaret Mead — Bird Room Triptych The Courage of Margaret Mead

“Where my art and space end is sort of vague.”

Murphy, 1997
Pontus Hulten 1983 essay lays the groundwork for the case for Brancusi as the first furniture artist and the first Brancusi of the sculptures proper; he emphasizes the artist’s “passionate concern for the rapport of his sculptures with the space around them” and demonstrates how around 1915 “the distinction between the sculptures, the works commonly referred to as their bases, and the other objects in Brancusi’s studio became ever more blurred.”

(Pontus Hulten)

It's the idea of the infinite with in the finite - the comfort in recognizing that physics/science/art all are about asking questions.

Todd Murphy (1962-2020), American experimental artist distinguished for his extraordinary use of materials—found, natural, and technological—to fashion immersive experiential environments, transcending scales from monumental to microscopic.

“Ultimately, what distinguishes Murphy from most of his American contemporaries is his commitment to the human- not the American—condition.”

"I visited Murphy at his studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and have never been so moved by an artist working Space."

“I have been back to Murphy's studio many times over the ensuing years, first in Atlanta and more recently near Charlottesville,Virginia. Each time, I have left with a sense of haunted remembrance and enigmatic drama."

“Murphy’s fixation on racism and the misuse of science, manifested since early in his career, proved not simply precocious, but prescient:"

"Art is not about the right color on the right surface; it's about synthesizing one's experience."

Yet the informal calligraphy seems to further support and identify with the single figure in a context that feels as primordial as the drawings on the walls of the ancient caves and, at the same time, as sophisticated and timely as a billboard

Simply described, they are made from found objects, from fabrics, dolls and wooden sculptures from Africa, Indonesia and here in the U.S. All this material is taken in to that vast, echoing, heroic mausoleum Todd Murphy calls his studio.

“I have been back to Murphy's studio many times over the ensuing years, first in Atlanta and more recently near Charlottesville,Virginia. Each time, I have left with a sense of haunted remembrance and enigmatic drama."

"I visited Murphy at his studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and have never been so moved by an artist working Space."

Monument to Sally Hemings

It has endurance and frailty built into its structure—its story is not one of event but of duration and of the duration of difference in the narration of human genetic material, material structures, built space, and urban design and development.

Murphy’s piece is then both historical and counter historical.

In a subsequent series, “Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Radio,” Murphy looked at the more general racism that inheres to anthropology even as he examined the scientistic tendency to denote, classify, and display.

What was supposed to be a stable and logical way of communicating and improving knowledge, Murphy indicates, amplified and perpetuated stereotypes: biology was – and very much remains -- as much a weapon of suppression as a tool of enlightenment.

I read a great quote by Goethe. I’m going to misquote him but it goes something like this, “anyone who can’t synthesize three thousand years of civilization is living hand to mouth.”

I am not afraid to reference antiquity or old masters.

When I say there is nothing new I mean we have been struggling with the nature of God for as long as we've been able to conceive that idea.

We've been trying to come to terms with the division of the soul and this apparatus, the body.

I try to make my art approachable. The average person not interested in art can appreciate my work for its beauty. Someone deeper into art can see the different layers.

“Todd Murphy’s Gesamtkunstwerk required not things to say so much as ways to say them, and the arc of his art takes us from declaration to account to poem.”

More and more, the tone and texture of his imagery became characters themselves, even as Murphy’s purview maintained its epic proportions

It wasn’t so much that he was assuming the mantle of a bard; in fact, he was always nearing that galvanizing position but always steering clear of its full implications.

Rather, Murphy was looking for a lyric voice, the lyric voice that kept breaking through the surface until he found the chiaroscuro, visual and spiritual, that could fully liberate it.

Todd Murphy’s Gesamtkunstwerk required not things to say so much as ways to say them, and the arc of his art takes us from declaration to account to poem.

Had he been able to give us another 20-30 years of work, Murphy would have found his way to music, too. As it is, his every artwork is a breaking into song -- into the soul of a song, and into a song of the soul

Todd Murphy Portfolio. Link to portfolios on images.

“Where my art and space end is sort of vague.”

TODD MURPHY (1962-2020)