Margaret Murphy is an artist, educator, and curator. She is currently the Director of the Center for Visual Arts at Johns Hopkins University.
Murphy holds an MFA in Painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
Her paintings and mixed media works have been exhibited internationally, including exhibitions at Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, Pentimenti Gallery, HPGRP Gallery (NY and Tokyo), Jersey City Museum, Gallery Aferro, Real Art Ways, Smack Mellon, and others.
She has received numerous honors, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, two NJ State Council on the Arts Fellowships, multiple Puffin Foundation grants, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, PS122 and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts to name a few.
Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, The Star Ledger, New American Painting (63), and featured on PBS's State of the Art..
Collections include the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, DC Art Bank Collection, Deutsche Bank, Zimmerli Museum of Art at Rutgers University, Central Michigan University, Hudson County Community College, Brodsky Center Rutgers University, and private collectors.
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 housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
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.