Amy Josephine Murphy
Title:
Adjunct Professor
Degrees:
MA in Philosophy- Aesthetics & Ethics, California State University, Long Beach, California
BFA in Sculpture- Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Contact:
Old Westbury:
Fine Arts Department
Midge Karr Fine Arts Center
e-mail:
Areas of Scholarly and Artistic Interest:
· Site-specific Installation
· Narrative text and perceptual/thought experimental sculpture
· Postmodern Art, Aesthetics, and Ethics
Career Summary:
As an undergraduate, Amy Murphy began at Moore College of Art and Design creating an open sculpture degree that allowed her to expand on her strong foundational curriculum with fashion design courses and internships in local Philadelphia theater set construction and costume shops. She was fortunate to work for the Philadelphia Museum of Art for five years to support her college education both financially and academically.
After two years at MCAD, she transferred to Temple University, Tyler School of Art to pursue large-scale outdoor sculpture and site-specific installations. The experimental environment of Tyler exposed Amy to conceptual art and new ways of thinking about art. With a focused concentration on aesthetics and sculpture, this experience allowed her to blend her literary strengths with installation and construction creating small-scale "sets" or vignettes to convey perceptual and epistemological concepts. In 1995, she had the remarkable opportunity to work as an artist's assistant to Ann Hamilton for her installation Tropos , at the Dia Center in New York. www.diacenter.org/exhibs/hamilton/tropos/
During her senior year at Tyler, she received The Dean's Merit Scholarship and completed an extra semester at Temple University Main Campus studying a full course load taking upper level psychology courses and theater courses. At this time she also worked as a research assistant for the psychology department and also did an internship as an art therapy coordinator at a hospital for adults with chronic and severe mental illness. Investigating the finer realms of our individual experience, perception, reality, and truth the combination of these extra-curricular activities led Amy to pursue graduate programs that would speak of and inform this ethereal realm she sought to understand, capture, and reflect.
Pursuing a graduate degree in philosophy was a decision based on a number of considerations, namely to engage in the study of a discipline that not only looked at such questions as: what is knowledge? what can we know? can we really know anything? -but also delved into analyzing complex questions relevant to the ethics and aesthetics of our post-modern society. While in graduate school, Amy worked in Los Angeles as the Assistant Art Director of a prop and scenic studio creating signature pieces for movies, television, and special events. In addition to her work and studies, she served as secretary in the Student Philosophy Association, was a graduate teacher's assistant, and was awarded Outstanding Graduate Honorable Mention.
Following graduation, Amy moved back to the east coast to create several public art murals and to teach art history courses at York College of Pennsylvania. In June 2004, she relocated to New York and worked as a research assistant and writer for a documentary filmmaker whose movies included: The Two Men of Storm King, Isamu Noguchi, Jacques Lipchitz .
In addition to experimenting with new sculptural forms and outsider art methods, Amy continues to write creative non-fiction, short fiction, and art reviews. During the winter of 2005, she had the pleasure to be part of the installation, monitoring, and removal crew of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates Project in Central Park, NYC. http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/tg.html
She also volunteers each year at the Tribeca Film Festival to build upon her knowledge of the independent film industry in New York. For the past few years, she has been excitedly studying all aspects of film and has a strong intuitive sense that this medium will perfectly pull together the multi-faceted aspects of her education, interests, and experience.
Currently, in addition to teaching art history at NYIT- Old Westbury campus, Amy Murphy teaches philosophy and aesthetics for SUNY, and is the Managing Editor & Assistant Publisher of GLASS Quarterly magazine www.glassquarterly.com. She enjoys glassblowing, another discipline she first studied as an undergraduate at Tyler School of Art.