“Growing up on a farm deep in the hills of rural Vermont I would always thirst for summer. I loved the deep bake of the heat after a dousing rain, when the buzz of bees and the whir and chirp of insects and birds formed a constant harmony."
Ethan received his B.A. from Carleton College and his MFA from The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also serves as Chair of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Ethan’s drawing, video, sculpture and installation projects delve into the idealized and uncomfortable ways in which histories are told, retold and molded into powerful, absurd and subjective narratives.
Barkers, vain explorers, mystifiers and false scientists, cloud catchers and touching inventors of chimeras; on the lookout for the heartbeat of a tree, on the shores of a forgotten sea, in search of hypothetical surviving monsters from the Cretaceous period, equipped with improbable devices, Ethan Murrow’s characters all go in search of of their dreams. Nothing is real, nothing can be so obvious are the inconsistencies and incongruities, and yet almost everything could be.
Recent solo museum shows include the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The Currier Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, the Clay Center in West Virginia. A monograph on his work came out with the German publisher Hatje Cantz.