Kevin Michael Murphy

Kevin Michael Murphy is a multidisciplinary artist whose work engages real and imagined ecologies, exploring connections between humans, other beings, and the lively material world that entangles us. In the course of past projects, he has constructed a utopian city for honeybees; tracked down one-inch land claims from a 1950s cereal promotion; cultivated algae to make light-sensitive pigments; and filmed the sun from a moving car for two-and-a-half hours straight.

Kevin holds a BFA in Visual Arts from UBC and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph. He has exhibited at venues across Canada and has received support from the BC Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2015, Kevin completed the Natural & the Manufactured Residency and Exhibition in Dawson City, Yukon. In 2021, his human/moss co-community experiment Sanctuary was installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia.

Kevin worked for years as the Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture Technician at UBC and is thrilled to join Arts Umbrella and return to education. As an Art & Design faculty member, Kevin gets to support Arts Umbrella programming, and through it, the efforts and explorations of young artists.

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