Blu Murphy: A Mirror of Black Excellence
Blu Murphy is an artist and an educator who uses her artistic skills as a vessel to teach essential values to her students. Born Brandy Murphy, the artist, uses the simple phrase “I am Art” to inspire her students to tap into their artistic potential. Murphy’s teaching career started by teaching art in group homes in Baltimore City and since has been teaching for 15 years in Title One schools and developed art programs for DMV-based charter schools. It was due to Murphy’s dedication to art that her school did not defund the arts as most other public schools. In fact, at Perry Street, art teachers earn the same as other teachers. Murphy has also headlined a solo exhibition, and she continues to teach art to children and encourage its therapeutic use to promote healing from generational trauma.
Murphy’s career as an educator is intrinsically linked with her artistic ideology. She believes every human is a piece of art and should value themselves as one would a piece of art. This approach also helped many of her students who did not value themselves enough. Murphy is also passionate about her community as an African American woman and uses her art to convey the vibrant personalities that make up her community. Her artwork is dedicated solely to depicting black people as art forms, a subcategory dubbed black portraiture. One of the most striking features of her artwork is the fact that the paint reaches outside the frame. In Murphy’s own words, she paints out the frame because their sauce cannot be contained. Her artwork affirms the massive underbelly of talent and colorful personalities that make up the black community in the United States.
Murphy launched her solo exhibition titled “Le Drip: The Uncontainable Sauce of Black Excellence” in 2022, which is a series dedicated to celebrating the magic, resilience, and unquestionable talent of the black community. Each piece in the exhibition focuses on Blu’s muses and juxtaposes current and historical black figures to create a narrative related to the history of black people in the United States. Murphy is also dyslexic and uses her graffiti tag to portray to the viewer what letters look like to her. The jumbled letters in the tag give the painting Murphy’s signature touch. The paint dripping outside the frame is not only a clever play on the exhibition's title, but it is also a message that the black community cannot be put into a box and framed.
Murphy’s ideology of humans as art is sorely needed in times like these when exposure to social media has made self-worth plummet, especially in younger individuals. Her work as an educator, uplifting and encouraging black children to express themselves, is meaningful beyond words. Art was always meant to be a tool to improve humanity, and Murphy has admirably used her skills to acknowledge a community that has long been persecuted and made to doubt its place in the world.
