Art Outside the Museum Walls

By: Maisie O'Brien 

Kendall Murphy loves public sculpture and the ways it shapes its surroundings. Embedded within and commenting on the local landscape and history, it offers passersby an opportunity to enjoy art outside the confines of a museum. “It’s cliché, but I believe art can change the world and bring people together,” she says. 

Growing up, museums were Murphy’s happy place. She cherished trips to the Getty Museum and the Oakland Museum of California with her grandparents. She loved interactive exhibits and the chance to learn new things. Museums always felt like fun, vibrant spaces, and she envisioned a future bringing this sense of exploration and wonder to others.  

As a student in the MA in Art History program, Murphy focused on Contemporary and American Modern art. This spring, she was awarded the Rhoda Saad Graduate Prize in Art History, recognizing outstanding academic excellence in art history as well as achievement in teaching, research, museum work, and community involvement.

Describe your professional and academic work prior to attending Tufts. What brought you to the MA in Art History program?  

As an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, I majored in Art History and Global Studies. During my time there, I interned at several museums, including the de Young Museum in San Francisco and UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum, where I got to help with an exhibition on the makeup of Star Trek, which was such a unique and fun experience!

After graduating, I spent three years working as a sales consultant at a commercial art gallery, helping place artwork in private collections. I then transitioned to a nonprofit film organization, leading community engagement and outreach for an annual film festival. Both roles solidified my passion for the arts and made me realize I wanted to pursue a graduate degree.

I was drawn to Tufts because of the program's academic rigor and language requirement, which I knew would push me to grow as a scholar. Because my focus is contemporary art, the faculty was a massive draw. I was incredibly excited about the prospect of learning from professors like Jacob Stewart-Halevy, who teaches the foundational methods class, and Adriana Zavala, who is an eminent researcher in the field.

Boston’s vibrant arts and cultural landscape was also a huge selling point. With so many world-class museums and phenomenal collections on the East Coast, I knew it would be an enriching place to live and study. Tufts’ strong liberal arts focus made it feel like the perfect intellectual home where I could grow as a scholar and explore the unique questions that humanities students are poised to ask.

Describe the research and teaching experience you gained at Tufts.

I wrote two qualifying papers on site-specific contemporary art. My first paper looked at the layered social histories of the New York waterfront, exploring how David Hammons's 2021 ghost structure Day's End reimagines Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 intervention at a pier warehouse. Through this, I developed the argument that site-specific art must function as a productive "wedge" into the physical, social, and cultural aspects of its environment, rather than serving as mere ornamentation.

For my second qualifying paper, I put Teresita Fernández’s sculpture made with malachite minerals in conversation with Beatriz Cortez’s migrating volcano sculpture, Ilopango, the volcano that left. I loved researching how both contemporary artists use art and the earth in a way that challenges our visions of history and the future. I am grateful for my professors who gave me the courage to take big swings in my research and writing.

I also had the opportunity to teach Tufts’ brilliant undergraduates as a TA for an Introduction to Architecture course and an Eco-Critical Medieval Art course, where I gave a lecture on contemporary land art and American landscape painting. I also led two classes through the Osher Lifelong Learning Center. These experiences were so rewarding, and I hope to find ways to continue teaching in the future.

Through fellowships and internships, I gained valuable archival and curatorial experience. I spent last summer working in the archives of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation in New York, helping organize a major library project. Currently I am completing  a curatorial fellowship at the Tufts University Art Galleries, where I conduct archival research and oral history interviews with alumni for an exhibition marking 150 years of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (SMFA). 

I’ve worked directly with contemporary artists like Michelle Lopez and Arnold Kemp, and I'm currently working with curators at the MFA Boston to jury and organize an upcoming exhibition of SMFA student artwork. Combined with the chance to present my research at three different conferences and edit our department’s art history journal, Ekphrasis, my time at Tufts has been a whirlwind of enriching experiences.

Describe the community at Tufts.

My cohort created a supportive atmosphere, which I really appreciate because grad programs aren't always like that—sometimes they’re competitive instead of warm and collaborative. I have classmates who will proofread my papers, and we prepared for our comprehensive exams together. We'll send each other jobs and opportunities if we think they'd be a good fit.

I was the graduate student liaison for the Art History Department, a position for second-year MA students who plan events and work to facilitate communication between students and faculty. I've had our entire cohort over to my place for craft nights, a Halloween party, and trivia, which was so fun!

I think the broader graduate community is really welcoming too. I've interacted with grad students in different departments, and everybody is just so serious about their scholarship. At Tufts, you can feel the level of investment in learning, education, and academic rigor through the liberal arts.