Painting with Purpose

Middle school wasn’t a pleasant place for Ryan Murray, but 20 years later he has returned to his tween-years’ alma mater to paint the change he wished he’d had for himself.

“I didn't have the easiest time being in a predominantly white area, especially as a black child growing up with a single mother,” Ryan says. “Those were the toughest years for me, and had a very adverse effect on my mental health growing up.”

He returned to his school in Florence, Massachusetts, during the 2023-2024 school year with a rainbow of paints, a prompt for students to create their safe places through collages, and an art therapist to support the kids’ feelings about the project. It was a test run for using therapeutic art to develop a mental health curriculum.

“I never had anything like that in my schools,” he says. “This project was not necessarily about the changes they wanted to see in the world, but the changes they wanted to see in their own personal world, which is an important facet of mental wellness.”

Ryan and his collaborator Sharona Color brought the kids’ collages to life in a mural called “Imagined Worlds,” splashing color and imagination across the school’s entrance. It’s one of several large-scale murals he’s undertaken, displaying inspirations from his personal work as an artist.

An Art Autobiography

The world Ryan imagined as a child behind the now-colorful school walls led him to Carnegie Mellon University to pursue a BFA in fine art. There, he broke out of what he describes as social anxiety. From painting records he got from the “free” box at Jerry’s Records in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood to painting themes on buggies, CMU helped Ryan create his story through art.

Using spray-painted stenciling on canvas, Ryan most frequently explores themes of Black mental health. The elements of his compositions are familiar people and places.

A work called “In Transition” includes a picture of Ryan as a boy in front of his high school, just a couple miles from the mural he just completed. Elephants express the elements left unspoken in the room as he dealt with covert racism, symbolizing the tense, overbearing weight of the experiences looming over his memories of that time.

“Where Do You Go When the Church Burns?” explores the stigma surrounding talking about mental health in Black communities. Ryan reflected on a hip-hop adage: if you’re scared, go to church. But juxtaposed with that: Historically, churches have also been attacked, threatening that literal and figurative sanctuary.

“Generally the church is a safe haven for Black people to express emotions,” he says. “The church can be the only place for us to express our feelings and break down emotionally if we need to. We need more avenues of supporting one another and being open.”

“Last Sunday Best” continues Ryan’s ruminations on the role of churches in Black communities and in support of mental health. It’s part of a series that features images from an abandoned church in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and applies screen print to paper instead of canvas.

Most familiar to fellow CMU alumni may be “20,” which incorporates architectural elements of Hamerschlag Hall.

“That refers to the age, 20. I was midway through college, I was not really having a good time,” Ryan says of a low point in his life.

Music (including lyrics that “buzzed around in his head” from Kendrick Lamar) and his art brought him through the depression.

While the themes are deeply personal to him, over his education and career the way that others have experienced his art sometimes feels like a surprise.

“People interpret your work in different ways, but that doesn't mean that it's necessarily true. Only you can really know that,” he says.

For more on Ryan and his art, visit RyanAMurray.com. He is currently represented by Art for the Soul Gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts.