I grew up on a farm in the heart of rural Vermont, always looking forward to its summers. I loved the intense warmth after a heavy rain, when the buzzing of bees, the hum of insects, and the chirping of birds formed a constant harmony.
— Ethan Murrow
Ethan Murrow was born in 1975 in Greenfield, Massachusetts, USA. He graduated from Carleton College and earned a degree in fine arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also holds the Chair of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts.
A virtuoso draftsman, he stages theatrical and unusual narratives on paper, exploiting shifts in scale to create striking perspectives. His works often feature characters pursuing impossible dreams, blending pastoral idealism, boundless ambition, and absurd humor.
Showmen, vain explorers, tricksters, and pseudo-scientists, cloud-catchers, and endearing inventors of chimeras; attentive to the heartbeat of a tree, on the edges of a forgotten sea, in search of hypothetical monsters surviving from the Cretaceous, equipped with improbable devices—Ethan Murrow’s characters all set out in pursuit of their dreams. Nothing is real, nothing could be, given the manifest inconsistencies and incongruities, and yet almost everything could be. His artistic universe, both poetic and critical, interrogates our relationship with history, nature, and human ambition, while celebrating the beauty of failures and wild dreams.
Among his recent solo exhibitions are the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Currier Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville.