Jo Owens Murray
920 Mt. Airy Road Collegeville, PA 19426
www.artbyjo.com artbyjo@verizon.net
610-454-1321


FROM: Jo Owens Murray was raised in Florence, South Carolina and is one of nine children. She has been residing in Pennsylvania and New York for the past eighteen years. Her first museum show was at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, Pa and was her family’s hometown. Her husband is Bill Murray

She graduated from Rosemont College in May 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History and is a self-taught artist. Ms. Owens Murray's sculptures are in the permanent collections of four museums.

STYLE; SURREALIST


Collections:
Sculpture in Permanent Collection of the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, Pa. "Rose” and “Material Girl"

Sculpture in Permanent Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. " Bridegroom Cometh"

Sculpture in the Permanent Collection of the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, Pa. J "Jeweled Beauty"

Sculpture in the Permanent Collection of the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA. "Equestrienne Dream"
Library Archives:

The National Museum of Women in the Arts,WDC 2007
The National Gallery of Art, WDC 2008
New Orleans Museum of Art, 2009


AWARD;

Ms Owens Murray was also selected as one of the Top Twelve Emerging Artists for the 1995-1996 Challenge Competition, Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.










Publication;
"Three Graces in One" Published in BEST OF AMERICA 2006
.


BEGINNING SCULPTURE published by Davis, 2003, 2007


Published in Art of Imagination 2006




By
Burton Wasserman
Art Critic, NJ



Jo Owens Murray has an uncanny knack for joining objective aware-ness with subjective impulses in order to shape artworks rich with sensitivehuman feeling and significant social commentary. She has developed anidiom entirely her own, one tree of debt to the style of any provincially academic art professors. Combining external sensory reality with suggestions for expressive form drawn from a deep reservoir of intuitive ideas, she makes sculpture that reflects what she has learned, both from her own life and from the accumu-lated interaction she has experienced with others in the world at large. The reach she brings to her unique vocabulary extends from the logical and the rational to a mysterious well spring of subconscious creative urges located within the substrata of her center most sinews.
Murray is well known in the Delaware Valley for the images she conceives with frequently hollow styrofoam figure forms that are covered with beads, bangles, brooches and buttons galore. For many years she has been hoping for a chance to present her work in New York City. That opportunity has finally come. Now, she is in the Ward-Nasse Gallery, 178 Prince St. New York

At first glance, Murray's doll forms may look rather naive. But, like the Jo Owens Murray has an uncanny knack for joining objective awareness with subjective impulses in order to shape artworks rich with sensitive human feeling and significant social commentary. She has developed an work of Paul Klee, Joan Miro and Joseph Comell, her sculpture is alive with subtle nuances of original iconography and discarded odds and ends taken from hither and yon. They have all been turned into inseparable parts of exquisitely mysterious, daringly inventive passages of poetic form in three dimensions.

Again and again, Murray breathes fresh, new life into the miscellaneous bits and pieces that emerge as the combined exterior appearance of her sculpture. In the manner of Louise Nevelson and Pablo Picasso, who transformed detritus found on the street into art, she also recycles what may seem to be grotesque trash into ecstatic treasure.

Perhaps in a dream you have seen variations of her figures when exercising your own capacity for fantasy. Maybe that's why some people believe they evoke a sense of
deja vu. Apparently, they are images with a strange and bizarre universality.

Consider the selection titled "Dear." It's an animal-like presence with the head of a doe (deer) and a base made from a circle of straight arrow shafts. Between the top and the bottom of the artwork, the body is covered by a beaded coat adorned with a fur collar. A complex of mingled elements, it all adds up to a strange totality of lyrical serenity and troubled anxiety. The forms may tell us what we believe is real is actually an illusion. Quite possibly, the artwork masks an otherwise invisible state of existence, one that can only be appreciated for what it is when we go beyond the surface and seek to discover what lies deep down within our own interiors.

Murray may well be on the way to becoming a legend in her own life- time. Her gift for inventive expression dealing with the social psychology of contemporary issues regarding women as trophies, clothes horses, demon witches and victims of alienation is filled with passionate conviction and steadfast determination.

Murray's ability to charge erotic identity with insights resulting from the passage of time and the consequences of a shifting state of mind are rarely given the esthetic spice and excitement she brings to what they're about. And who else gives authenticity to the notion of belonging to the human family with such a touch of humor and so much definitive grace? Frankly, I think it's very fair to say, "Few other artists can make sculpture so extraordinarily able to run both red hot and cool blue at the self-same moment!"
artbyjo@verizon.net www.artbyjo.com


Graziella Marchicelli, Ph.D

Fine Arts Curator
The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art


The Surrealist inclination to aestheticize found objects and often juxtapose incongruent ones led tothe experimentation of department store mannequins as art objects—a natural choice considering themannequin's malleability. In the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme, organized by Paul Eluard,Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, the Surrealists presented department storemannequins as apparitions d'etres-objets (phantom object-beings).1 Andre Masson's female mannequinattracted the most attention. "Her head is imprisoned in a bird cage...her mouth masked, with a pansydirectly over the opening...She cannot speak; she is entrapped even as she is decorated, wearing at oncetoo much and too little, dressed up and dressed down, naked and rendered mute, added to andsubtracted from, but most of all entrapped"2 The female mannequin was the Surrealists' readymadeplaything—tamed, silent and submissive.

The female mannequin has also fascinated Jo Owens Murray. A self-taught artist, Murray received aBachelor of Arts in art history from Rosemont College, Pennsylvania in 1993, and managed RosemontCollege's Women's Center until she decided to become a full time artist. Born in Durham, North Carolina,Murray left home at age nineteen, eventually settling in Pennsylvania where her family roots lie.
Although Murray started her career as a photographer, she was drawn to assemblage sculpture byway of experiments with various materials and fabrics. Murray's assemblage sculptures, which she calls"the girls", are unique and exceptional examples of contemporary Surrealism, and her application ofbeads and jewels adhered to mannequins is a pioneering technique. Her sculptures are heavily encrustedwith large, brightly colored beads, buttons, mirrors, costume jewelry, plastic flowers, feathers, bridal veilsand birdcages.

Murray defies the current art world's tendency to pad each work with profuse rhetoric or lengthystatements. Although she states that her work is about specific concerns regarding women, she makes apoint of stepping back and allowing room for viewer interpretation. Murray's beaded sculptures promptquestions about beauty, femininity, identity, loss, grief and redemption. Her sculptures explore mythsabout women. Journalist Burton Wasserman wrote that Murray's work has "deeply rooted layers ofpersonal memory, thought and feeling, joined with reflections on the various roles played by women insociety, past and present."3 About herself, Murray says, "My sculptures reflect my own upbringing as ayoung girl, my fantasies combined with the realities of today."

Murray's beaded sculptures have many personae. They are warriors, princesses, mothers, brides andcircus performers. "My work tells of the myth of how women should be seen and not heard. Theyshould reflect only their external beauty. As women we have become more concerned with our outerappearance. That is why my girls are nothing more than empty, hollow shells; all they have is their outerbeauty. Like the Surrealists, I have transformed women into fixtures. They are only parts and neverwhole."

Bird in a Gilded Cage (1999) and Gateway to Your Soul (1998) depict female heads covered withbright, colorful jewels. In Bird in a Gilded Cage, a woman's beautiful beaded and jeweled head is placedinside a cage decorated on one side with a garland of red flowers. Her left eye is a flower and her right amirror. She has grapes wrapped around her neck and her mouth is sealed with a butterfly. The woman ispure ostentation, literally all glitz, and she is trapped. Murray describes the woman as "always pretty,always thin and always quiet."


In Gateway to Your Soul, a beaded head hangs from a bird stand. The eyes are replaced withmirrors, allowing the viewer to see his or her own eyes. The bodiless woman suggests enchantment andseduction, but there is, at the same time, something menacing about her. Her collar is reminiscent of aspider web and the beads around her mirror-eyes suggest a mask. Carl Jung's "dark side of the self" ishinted at here; it is "the most dangerous thing of all, precisely because the self is the greatest power inthe psyche."4

Murray s bejeweled assemblages of female mannequin neaas, mannequin Doaies ana masks suggest ahost of intriguing dualities: beauty/ugliness, virgin/harlot, predator/prey, human/automaton, amongothers. Let's Play (2001), for example, brings to mind more than one duality. Half mannequin, half horse,Let's Play is a mannequin torso with a horse's head. The half human, half animal figure wears a weddingdress and is adorned from head to waist with jewels and beads. Murray's horse-mannequin standsstraight and looks ahead, oddly reminiscent of the host of mythological characters and deities of azoomorphic nature: Bast, the cat-headed Egyptian goddess; Ganesha, the Hindu god with an elephant'shead; the Greek sphinx, a monster with a woman's head and a lion's body, just to name a few. Beyondthe evident duality of man/animal, the juxtaposition of horse and wedding dress also suggests suchdualities as power/innocence and passion/virginity.

Murray explores a variation of the old saying, "Clothes make the man." Instead, she plays with theidea, "Clothes make the woman." The mannequin bust, Material Girl (1997), is a self-absorbed beautywith high cheekbones and prominent, red lips sealed with a jewel. Similarly, Lady in Red (2001) alsoconveys conceit and vanity. Murray observes, "Jewelry provides a history of women through differentstyle periods....We can look back to the earliest drawings, carvings and paintings, and you will always findwomen adorned with jewelry. We are always trying to enhance our appearance by adding pretty objectsto cover our bodies." Murray is critical of women who use jewelry to hide themselves; she asks "Havewe turned ourselves into the object we wear?" Are we stopping others from seeing us, our true selves?

Murray leaves the observer with more questions than answers. The assemblages are highly evocativebut forever puzzling. She approaches each work with a keen sense of intention and strategy, but, in thetrue spirit of Surrealism, she avoids easy answers for her viewers. Rather, she lets nuance, strangeness,unease and mystery abound.

Artist Statement

I started my career as a photographer, but was drawn to assemblage sculpture by way of experiments with various materials and fabrics. My assemblage sculptures, which I call "the girls", are unique and exceptional examples of contemporary Surrealism, and the application of beads and jewels adhered to mannequins is a pioneering technique. The sculptures are heavily encrusted with large, brightly colored beads, buttons, mirrors, costume jewelry, plastic flowers, feathers, bridal veils and birdcages.

The beaded sculptures prompt questions about beauty, femininity, identity, loss, grief and redemption. Journalist Burton Wasserman wrote that my work is "deeply rooted layers of personal memory, thought and feeling, joined with reflections on the various roles played by women in society, past and present." To me, my sculptures reflect my own upbringing as a young girl, my fantasies combined with the realities of today







Recommendations:

Dr. Michael Tomor, Director of the El Paso Museum of Art, One Arts Festival Plaza,
El Paso, Texas, 79901
Phone 915-532-1707

Lee Steven, Senior Curator of The State Museum 300 North Street,
Harrisburg, PA 17120-0024
Phone 717-787-4980


Michael Schantz Director of the Woodmere Art Museum
9201 Germantown Ave. Philadelphia, PA 19118.
Phone 215-247-0476


Susan Fisher Sterling, Director of The National Museum of Women in the Arts.
1250 New York Avenue, NW. Washington, DC. 20005.
Phone 202-783-5000


Bobby Moore, Interim Curator Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art at Altoona
1210 11th Ave. Altoona, PA 16601Phone 814- 946-4464