Murray Reich
Born and raised in New York City, Murray Reich (1932-2012) attended City College and received his M.F.A. in Painting from Boston University. As a younger artist, he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and studied at Hunter College with Robert Motherwell and Richard Lippold. Following his first solo show in New York at Max Hutchinson Gallery, Reich was awarded a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship. His work was exhibited in two Whitney Annuals, as well as in solo shows and group exhibitions, most recently at the Telfair Museums in Savannah.
Reich was Professor Emeritus of Painting at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he taught for 25 years. He served on the faculty of the Graduate Program in Art at Hunter College in New York. He was the inaugural director of Tanglewood's Summer Program in Art in Massachusetts, and also taught at Boston University. In his last years he inaugurated a course in painting for seniors from the Lower East Side and Chinatown in the center at Sarah Roosevelt Park.
Reich lived and worked in New York City, Provincetown, and Mt. Tremper in upstate New York, where he was involved with several long-standing interests, including Yang style tai-chi chuan, fly-fishing and playing squash. His last painting series focused on the iconic dynamics of arrows and, starting in 2003, he pursued a project of street photography that offered a counterpoint to the paintings.
In 2015 in memory of the artist, the New York Foundation for the Arts created the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award, an annual unrestricted cash award to enable artists with a long history of creative practice to pursue deeper investigations or new explorations that can inform or enrich their work.