This portrait of New York artist Elizabeth Murray explores the relationship between her career and her domestic life, referenced so often in her work, and considers her place alongside the male ‘heroes’ of contemporary American art.
Everybody Knows… Elizabeth Murray looks back at an unpretentious groundbreaker on the Downtown art scene.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2017
Everybody Knows… Elizabeth Murray 2016
“Kristi Zea brings to her debut, Everybody Knows... Elizabeth Murray, all the visual smarts she developed as a costume designer and award-winning production designer for Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. A friend of Murray’s since the 80s, the filmmaker captures the vivacious artist’s flair for colour and shape. Murray’s zany, fractured canvases feature paeans to domesticity (crying children, coffee cups) as they fairly burst with the remarkable good humor and energy the artist herself exhibited even in the final days of her life.” — Film Forum
“While she achieved a good deal of recognition in her lifetime, Elizabeth Murray, the subject of this fine yet too-short documentary, remains an American artist who hasn’t quite gotten her due. This cogent, fascinating portrait of the artist, who died in 2007 at 66… shows the great variety of Murray’s always vivid, colorful work, and culminates with a triumph not just for Murray but also, as the film takes pains to point out, for women in American art: a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art… Meryl Streep, reading from Murray’s journals, does well communicating her emotional and intellectual acuity.” — Glen Kenny, NY Times