J. B. Murray
(1908–1988)
BornGeorgia, United States
DiedSandersville, Georgia, United States
BiographyAll of J. B. Murray’s paintings display a non-discursive text scrawled alongside abstract patterns, from which ghostly figures appear to emerge. He made thousands of these works with a range of materials, including watercolor, crayon, tempera, felt-tip pen, and ink, on paper and on unconventional surfaces such as rolls of adding-machine tape, stationery, glass, and the exterior and interior walls of his house. The primary colors each had their own symbolic weight, from red for evil to yellow for divine power. He was compelled by his visions of a struggle between good and evil for the souls of humanity. As he said of the tall, spectral figures that fill his art, “Them is the people what is living like God don't exist.”Until he had a spiritual experience in his seventies, John Bunion Murray had spent his life as a tenant farmer in rural Glascock County, Georgia. Born in 1908, he, like many Black Americans in the South, had experienced educational disenfranchisement and never learned to read or write. He was a member of the Pentecostal Church and deeply religious. As he would relate, one day he was watering a patch of potatoes in his garden and witnessed the sun descend and radiate prismatic colors through his yard. In a 1986 interview with art historian Judith McWillie, he recalled, “I prayed and the Lord sent a vision from the sun. . . . The eagle crossed my eye—it shade the sun. . . . You know an eagle can see farther than any bird in the world and that’s why that I can see things some more folks can’t see.” Just as he first was awed by the transformation of the world through the arcing water of a garden hose, he would later interpret his paintings by gazing through a bottle of well water—“Water saves. You can’t hinder water. Water will soak down and come up in another place.”
Murray’s physician, William Rawlings, and the artist Andy Nasisse helped supply him with art materials and supported the recognition of his work, which was being exhibited in gallery shows of folk and self-taught art by the early 1980s. After he received a diagnosis of prostate cancer, his paintings took on a more amebic nature, as if this eternal battle for salvation was now happening at a cellular level within his body. He died in 1988.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).