Tracy Murrell is an Atlanta based visual artist. Murrell exhibits both locally and nationally. Her work has been featured in art publications including Create! Magazine, New American Paintings, Atlanta Magazine's Home, and Thom Magazine. Murrell is ArtFolio's 2022 Gold category winner in Painting: Traditional/Contemporary. Murrell has been awarded residencies at The Hambidge Center; Atlanta Printmakers Studio; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and Green Olive Arts in Tetouan, Morocco. In 2022, she was awarded a Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) Practitioner Fellowship. In 2020, Georgia Tech University unveiled two paintings by Murrell commissioned by the AKA Sorority for the Crosland Tower library. In 2021, Microsoft acquired 6 works from the Sumaya series and, in 2022, The Coca-Cola Company acquired "Rose and Enoch" from The Haiti Series for their permanent collection. For 2023, Murrell started a 2-year residency with The Creative Project's Artist-in-Studio program exploring community engagement and public art to add to her practice. Her latest accomplishment is The German publishing company, Rowohlt, releasing four of Toni Morrison's books with Murrell's work on the covers. The covers feature "Her Mind is Open", "The Little Ballerina", "Dahlia I" and "Sister, I Got Your Back".
Art Statement
My work is a celebration of the beauty and grace that I see in all women of color. My intent is for the viewer to slow down, take their time, take it all in, and find their connection to the portraits before them. The thread is there ... we are all human beings with rich lives filled with grace.
I am drawn to images of the female form; it is the silhouette of women that are of particular interest to me. I see the poise and energy women inhabit in the world, which is so often commodified in popular media. In response to this, I offer counter symbols of women as figures personifying grace and strength. In my work, I explore the use of silhouettes by recontextualizing images from popular culture to use as entry points for deeper conversations on gender, race, and the perceptions of beauty. Using photographs, my process begins by reducing the subjects to their essential elements, eliminating everything until they are stripped to raw imagery of line to expose their most compelling details.
In the current body of work, I am focusing on the themes of identity, migration, and displacement in the human narrative by incorporating hand cut patterns, encaustic painted papers that I collage with the silhouettes.
