About

Professor Murphy is a scholar of modern and contemporary art, with a focus on global intersections between art, media, and political crisis throughout the last half century, and with particular expertise in the Latin American region. He is working on his first book that will examine the first generation of artists from Latin America who began experimenting with video technology as an artistic medium during the 1970s. Interpreting these experiments within the context of the repressive authoritarian dictatorships that had come to power across much of the region during the period, the book explores how artists from sites as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico proposed new modes of communication and political action through this novel technology. In addition to the book, Prof. Murphy has published academic essays and art criticism in journals such as ARTMargins and Texte zur Kunst, as well as in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, and on digital platforms. Forthcoming articles address questions of archival silence and interdisciplinary method in the work of Argentine artist Lea Lublin, dynamics of intermediality and opacity in the printmaking practice of Cuban artist Belkis Ayón, as well as trans-disciplinary connections between experimental art and social science disciplines, namely sociology, in the Latin American region. A second book project, currently in preparation, takes a trans-historical and trans-regional approach to explore artists across the Americas who have appropriated money and other monetary devices as artistic mediums throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Tracing practices engaged with a spectrum of money’s manifestations, from coins and paper currency to sophisticated financial instruments such as trusts and bonds, the project investigates how artists can illuminate the constitutive connections between our current capitalist condition and the historical processes of extraction, colonization and enslavement that shaped modernity in the Americas.

Prior to joining the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve, Prof. Murphy was the A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Before that, he served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of art history at the University of Oregon. In addition to his academic activities, Prof. Murphy has worked at several museums including the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and, most significantly, at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he co-curated an exhibition on the work of pioneering Mexican video and performance artist Pola Weiss in 2014 titled Pola Weiss: La TV te ve. Murphy has been the recipient of several grants and awards, including fellowships from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, New York, the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Paris, and the US Fulbright Commission. In 2023, his doctoral dissertation was awarded Princeton University’s Jane Faggen Prize for distinguished dissertation in the Department of Art and Archaeology, as well as an honorable mention for the Association for Latin American Art’s Biennial Dissertation Award.