ABOUT

ARTIST BIO

Margaret Murphy is a conceptual realist painter whose work uses craft and beauty to explore themes of gender, consumer culture, and aesthetic history. She earned her MFA in Painting from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts and has served as Director of the Center for Visual Arts at Johns Hopkins University since 2018.


Murphy’s work has been recognized with awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Puffin Foundation, and multiple New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships, and has been further supported through residencies at MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Newark Museum, Cooper Union, and PS122, among others.


Her solo exhibitions have been presented at Pentimenti Gallery, Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, HPGRP Gallery, the Jersey City Museum, Real Art Ways, Gallery Aferro, as well as in the critically noted traveling survey Margaret Murphy: A Ten Year Survey: Decoding the Marketplace, coupons, dollar stores and ebay. A catalogue with essays by Dr Midori Yoshimoto and Dr Rocio Aranda-Alvarado accompanied the exhibition. She has exhibited widely in national and international group exhibitions and art fairs across New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, the Midwest and Japan.


Murphy’s work has received substantial critical acclaim, including reviews in The New York Times by Holland Cotter, Benjamin Genocchio, Helen Harrison, and William Zimmer, and coverage in the Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Design NJ Magazine, The Star-Ledger, Elle Décor, The Baltimore Sun, New American Paintings, Hyperallergic,Two Coats of Paint and PBS State of the Arts.


Her paintings and works on paper are held in significant public and private collections, including the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Deutsche Bank, the DC Art Bank Collection, Zimmerli Art Museum, Hudson County Community College Fund, and numerous university and private collections.


Margaret's curatorial projects include founding, directing and curating exhibitions at The Garage (2005-2009) her street level exhibition space in JC, NJ. The archives of The Garage are in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.


Photo by Megan Maloy, @megan_maloy

Informed by current events, personal experience and the history of painting, I navigate the intersection of gender, class, and consumerism. Through my practice, I reflect on how consumerism co-opts and commodifies femininity, how politics police women’s bodies, and how systemic inequality is disguised within aesthetics.


Through a combination of personal narrative and sociopolitical critique, these themes surface in works that visually seduce through beauty and surface, drawing viewers closer only to confront them with deeper, often uncomfortable truths.


The painted surface plays a central role in this dynamic. I employ color symbolism, trompe l’oeil techniques, and deliberate materiality to oscillate between illusion and confrontation. Beauty is a strategic tool in my work—a lure that invites intimacy before exposing the complexities beneath.





All images copyright Margaret Murphy, 2000 - 2025

An Icompendium Site