Baker Artist Portfolios

Margaret Murphy is a conceptual realist painter  who uses craft and beauty to engage with complex themes of gender, consumer culture, and aesthetic history. 

Murphy earned her MFA in Painting from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts and has served as Director of the Center for Visual Arts at Johns Hopkins University since 2018. 

Murphy’s work has been recognized with awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Puffin Foundation, DC Commission on the Arts, and two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships, and has been further supported through over a dozen artist residencies including MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Newark Museum, Cooper Union, Central Michigan University, PS122, and others. Her solo exhibitions have been presented at Pentimenti Gallery, the Jersey City Museum, New Jersey City University, HPGRP Gallery, Ramapo College, Real Art Ways, Gallery Aferro, and Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, as well as in the critically noted ten year traveling survey Decoding the Marketplace. She has exhibited widely in national and international group exhibitions and art fairs across New York, New Jersey, Miami, Philadelphia, Osaka, and the Midwest. 

Murphy’s work has received substantial critical acclaim, including reviews in The New York Times by Holland Cotter, Benjamin Genocchio, Helen Harrison, and William Zimmer, and coverage in the Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Design NJ Magazine, The Star-Ledger, Elle Décor, The Baltimore Sun, New American Paintings, Hyperallergic, and other arts publications. Her paintings and works on paper are held in significant public and private collections, including the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Deutsche Bank, the Art Bank Collection of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and numerous university and private collections.