About the artist
1908–1988, lived and worked in Glascock County, Georgia
Born in Sandersville, Georgia in 1908, the enigmatic African American artist J.B. Murry spent much of his life as a tenant farmer in rural Glascock County. He raised eleven children with his wife Cleo Kitchens, and apparently exhibited no artistic aspirations until his septuagenarian days. A deeply religious man, he experienced a transformative spiritual vision in the late 1970s, following a hip injury and a visit with a local doctor, William Rawlings, Jr., who soon became Murry’s spiritual and artistic advisor as well as his physician. Believing that God had charged him with an evangelical mission, he reinvented himself as a scribe in the service of the Lord, creating and proliferating a vast body of drawings and paintings he referred to as “spirit scripts.” These cryptic works feature an arcane, visually dense writing system, as sanctioned by God and indecipherable to most viewers—the artist himself was only able to translate the texts by peering through a bottle of lensatic holy water.
Dr. Rawlings and other interested parties eventually provided Murry with conventional artistic materials, but in the first period of his practice, the artist inscribed any available found surface to which he responded. Later iterations of his work incorporated figurative elements, though much remained abstract in his intensely personal world of orphic calligraphy and sacred meaning. Murry was a brilliant colorist who wrote and drew obsessively, and his prolific output resembles a kind of vernacular version of illuminated manuscripts, Dada and Surrealist visual poetry, or the paintings of Mark Tobey, wherein optical and semiotic components and articulations coalesce or drift apart. His limpid, map-like drawings in mixed media are a testament to the power of belief in everyday life and the vitality of text art in the pantheon of American vernacular artists.
—Brendan Greaves
Above: photo by Roger Manley
Bibliography
Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988.
Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Trechsel, Gail Andrews, ed. Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-taught Art from the Collection of Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae-Yelen. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, in association with University Press of Mississippi, 1995.