Denise Murrell (MBA 1980) spent the majority of her career on Wall Street, but pursued her passion for art in night classes, working her ways towards a master’s in art history. After traveling during a paid non-compete period, Murrell made a change. “With some time and reflection, I realized I wanted to place my art endeavors at the center of my life and work,” she wrote in a profile celebrating 50 years of women in the MBA program. “By the end of that hiatus, I was enrolled in a full time PhD program at Columbia.”

A recent article in the New York Times highlights Murrell’s new exhibition at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today. The exhibition includes the Manet piece “Olympia”—the subject of Murrell’s 2014 dissertation—which shows a white prostitute with a black maid at her bedside, the latter character often overlooked in academic discussions. “This woman is in full view, but she’s invisible, ignored in the narrative,” Murrell told the Times. “Would Manet really give all this pictorial space to someone he didn’t want us to pay attention to?”

In a press release from Columbia announcing the exhibit, Murrell recalls her first time she viewed the painting as a graduate student. “My heart was pounding and I wondered what would be said about the black servant ... and was really concerned that nothing at all was mentioned. …As I did that, I understood that she was not just the subject of Manet’s work, but of works by many successive generations of artists. As I looked more deeply into the archival and anecdotal material about her, I became aware of how extensive her legacy was with a pattern of images that exist across the last 160 or so years.”

 The Times article also notes the challenges that Murrell has faced in her quest to secure support for her research.

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