Jesse Murry: Rising
Curated by Lisa Yusgavage & Jarrett Earnest
Aug 24–Dec 3
Jesse Murry: Rising presents a group of the artist’s oil paintings created between 1988 and 1993, the last five years of Murry’s life, when he was confronted with the reality of his impending mortality from AIDS-related illness. The works testify to Murry’s lifelong belief in the capacity of painting to hold the complexity of human meaning—at the meeting of a material fact and a location within the mind.
At the heart of Rising, dwells the intimate and devoted friendship between Jesse Murry and Lisa Yuskavage. The two painters met at the beginning of their tenure at the Yale School of Art, where they received their MFAs in 1986. In the midst of Yale’s notoriously difficult environment, they developed an artistic and intellectual fellowship, supporting and challenging one another as they discovered and grew their artistic vision.
In Yuskavage’s words: “He was the most erudite person I ever met. He was physically grand: tall, with a big belly, and very dominant. He went to Yale graduate school in his late 30s to become a painter after publishing art criticism and being an art history professor . . . He knew everything: film, fiction, history, trash TV shows, theater, poetry, Broadway, opera, pop music, you name it; and yet, though he got started very late, he wanted badly to paint . . . The fact that he didn’t have a future is heartbreaking.” Thanks to Yuskavage’s unshakable belief, Murry’s work is now receiving the recognition and analysis it deserves.
Like a line of poetry across a page, the painted horizon was Murry’s guiding ideal and the central focus of his work. For Murry, it encompassed the moment in which near and far, inside and outside, and self and other, could be negotiated and reconciled. Fusing the Romantic painting tradition of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner with the quality of mind and imagination of Wallace Stevens’s poetry, Murry uniquely sought to create landscapes within a fiction of painting that could be “more than a place to dwell but a suitable space for dreams.” Built of subtly shifting and layered color, Murry described his paintings as “places summoned by the memory through the imagination; where the elements of WEATHER are protagonists that act out moods open to many readings; where light and space have a spiritual import.”
In the seven years following Yale, before he died, Murry painted with extraordinary dedication, holding his first one-person show at the Sharpe Gallery in New York in 1987. He also continued to write about the history of painting and his own work, exploring their relationship to philosophy, poetry, and spirituality.
At the Cooley, Jesse Murry’s paintings are accompanied by two special projects: a video remembrance directed by Lisa Yuskavage; and a letterpress edition of Murry’s 1993 ten-page poem Aphorisms, which the artist dictated to his partner during the last days of his life. The edition is designed and letterpress printed by Portland-based bookbinder and artist Rory Sparks.
A recently-published book of Murry’s complete writings—edited by exhibition co-curator Jarrett Earnest—is available at the Cooley: Painting Is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993, edited, and with an introduction by Jarrett Earnest. Forward by Hilton Als. Soberscove Press, 2021.
The Cooley and Converge 45 gratefully acknowledge the lenders to the exhibition: Candida Smith, and the Jesse Murry Foundation, Peter Stevens, President.