If William Murray created a painting he wasn’t happy with, he wouldn’t disregard it and start over on a fresh canvas, as some artists might.
Instead, his wife, Angie Murray, said, he would keep reworking the same piece; amending it, rethinking it, turning day into night, pushing it until he thought it stood on its own.
You could say William Murray, who essentially created and spent several decades leading the fine art education program at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater in Bayport, took the same approach to people, too: No incarcerated student was unreachable. Every person had something they could express through art.
“He could really see how much of a difference art made to these guys,” Angie Murray said. “Just having a little positive reinforcement or encouragement to express themselves in a way that was acceptable was astonishing. The wardens over the years said he’d taken some of the most recalcitrant inmates and made the art program into a transformative experience.”
William Murray, a respected professional artist and educator and avid outdoorsman, died Nov. 11, 2024. He was 76 years old.
‘Instrumental in changing some minds’
William Murray was born June 5, 1948, in St. Paul and grew up relatively poor, Angie Murray said. During the Vietnam War, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and was nearly deployed, but ultimately served on an icebreaker ship in the Great Lakes. And after graduating from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, he and a few other artists would volunteer at the Stillwater prison.
In 1977, Murray was offered a full-time role as the prison’s fine arts instructor, which he held till he retired in 2003 and, even then, continued to return as a substitute teacher. It was also at the prison, in the late 1980s, where Murray, who was divorced and had two young sons, met Angie, a teaching assistant. They married in 1993.
Murray transformed arts education in the prison from an informal offering into a legitimate and well-respected program, structured like a job inmates had to apply for and, in turn, could be unenrolled from if they did not participate or take it seriously. Although a prison population is naturally somewhat transient, some students were in his class for more than a decade, longtime friend Rachel Daly said.
Murray respected the inmates as people, Angie Murray said. Sure, he was tough — he took no BS and wasn’t afraid to get scrappy, which infamously got him in trouble a couple of times — but never condescending. He had an uncanny ability to notice and encourage positive qualities in a person that they might not even have seen themselves, she said.
“That was art therapy before there was art therapy,” his son Colin Murray said. “I think he was instrumental in changing some minds about rehabilitation and mental health.”
‘Finding a reason to paint’
Outside of teaching, Murray was himself a prolific professional painter and regularly showed art at local galleries including Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis. For many years, much of his work depicted quiet nature scenes, especially inspired by the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
But when he retired from the prison, those familiar with his art were surprised by what felt like a drastic change in tone. He no longer compartmentalized the deep sadness and violence of prison, family and friends said, and his own lifelong mental health struggles continued. Art-making now needed to do for him what he had taught decades of students it could do for them: Process “that bag of crap they were carrying around,” as Murray himself put it in a 2013 interview.
“All of a sudden, the work was dark, harsh … he needed to have an avenue for letting some of that toxicity and darkness out of him,” said Daly, who at the time was the director of visual arts at Bloomington Theatre and Art Center, now called Artistry.
The pair organized a gallery show, “Out of the Abyss: William Murray and the Prison Art Project,” which was on view at the art center in April and May 2013 and exhibited Murray’s work alongside paintings by his students in the prison.
The show was also a full-circle moment for Daly: Her father, also a teacher, had been a close colleague of Murray’s at the prison. Daly was introduced to Murray when she was in elementary school and credits him with inspiring her to pursue a career in the arts.
In the later years of his life, Murray once again found joy in painting Boundary Waters scenes. But, like him, the art had changed. Whereas his earlier oil paintings were “really tight, really descriptive,” as Groveland Gallery manager Andrea Bubula said, his more recent paintings — mostly watercolor — seemed to center on emotion and memory.
“There’s making paintings, and then there’s finding a reason to paint,” she said. “And his insight and sensitivity really showed.”
Some of Murray’s newer paintings were included in a 2024 group show at Groveland, and he and Bubula were in the final stages of planning a pop-up solo retrospective exhibition when Murray died, she said. She and Angie Murray are working to rethink and reschedule the show in honor of his memory, both said.
The family is also planning a celebration of life at 2 p.m. March 30 at Dakota Lodge, 1200 Stassen Lane, West St. Paul.
In a 2013 promotional article for the “Out of the Abyss” show, Murray recalled a common message he repeated to students in the prison.
“I said, ‘You’re going to make some bad drawings,’” he said. “‘Failure is a part of the process of art, just like you’re going to make some mistakes in life. But you have a choice: To learn from those mistakes, or let them destroy you.’”
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