Murphy Rabb, Inc.

11/06/2018

Can't say we blame him!

In a Q&A focusing on questions of public art and an artist's responsibility to his city and vice-versa, Kerry James Marshall vows that he will make no more public art after he felt stung by the city's plan, recently rescinded, to sell off a multimillion-dollar Marshall canvas to pay for a library

08/22/2018

I'm happy that his work is finally being recognized but saddened it happened after his death.

A show in Baltimore, traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, uncovers 50 years of unknown sculpture by a major African American artist

08/10/2018

Absolutely the finest of artists in her collection!

Their mother, Tina Knowles Lawson, is a serious art collector with an impressive collection of works by African American artists

07/20/2018

To describe someone as a Renaissance man may appear to be clichéd, but in the case of Romare Bearden, truer words cannot be used in paying tribute to this fascinating

07/05/2018

In honor of Independence Day, an article about Faith Ringgold, the amazing African American Artist!

Exploring art by and about people of African descent, primarily through the lens of books, magazines and catalogs, Culture Type features original research and reporting and shares invaluable interestingness culled from the published record on black art.

06/06/2018

Here's an easier way to own some work by Carrie Mae Weems!

Label’s latest Art Series T-shirts and posters feature series of striking daily photographs taken by the African-American while at her kitchen table

08/02/2017

Chris was the speaker at the Rabb-Venable Award for Outstanding Research in Ophthalmology at the annual dinner. A proud moment.

07/07/2016

Honored to recently be featured in IIT Magazine

Madeline Murphy Rabb’s career in the art world has been anything but a still life. Rabb (DSGN ’75) is founder and president of Murphy Rabb, Inc., a fine arts advisory firm in Chicago. She has created a career landscape spanning more than 40 years as an artist, arts administrator, jewelry designer, c...

04/18/2014

Roberts & Tilton congratulates Betye Saar who will receive the 55th annual Edward MacDowell Medal for lifetime achievement in the arts on August 10, 2014. The MacDowell Colony, the nation's first artist residency program, has awarded the medal annually since 1960 to an individual artist who has made an outstanding contribution to his or her field.

Betye Saar, who started as a printmaker, is perhaps best known for her intimate assemblages and collages, which not only challenge the myths and negative stereotypes ascribed to the African-American community but also demonstrate a connection with a myriad of mythic and spiritual concepts from Africa and the Caribbean. The artist, who eventually moved into working with found objects in larger-scale installations, joins an impressive list of past Medal recipients, including Robert Frost (1962), Georgia O'Keeffe (1972), Leonard Bernstein (1987), Jasper Johns (1994), I.M. Pei (1998), Ellsworth Kelly (1999), and Stephen Sondheim (2013).

"Betye Saar has been a key influence in the dialogues around race and gender in the art world since the 1960s," said Museum of Arts and Design Curator Lowery Stokes Sims, chairman of the Edward MacDowell Medal Selection Committee who will introduce Saar at the ceremony. "Her exquisite collages have posed questions, challenged presumptions, and have never failed to demonstrate her unique aesthetic sensibility."

MacDowell Colony Chairman and author Michael Chabon, who will present the medal, said, "Betye Saar uses shards of myth and narrative, and found bits of history - with all its pain and magnificence - to build scale models of a world that is intensely personal and yet instantly, inescapably recognizable as our own broken world. These scale models of brokenness help us to interpret and find meaning in that world, mapping it with fierceness, a sense of play, and the wild accuracy you find among the great cartographers and world-builders, also known as artists, whose explorations the MacDowell Colony has for so long striven to foster and sustain."

04/10/2014

Join me at the Chicago Cultural Center on Tuesday April 15th at 6pm for a conversation about Chicago's Public Art Program...

12/03/2013

I am so sad to tell you the artist Russell Gordon was found dead in his home in Montreal last week. Anyone knowing his family, please let them know. The person who told me of his death does not have any information about his next of kin.