Todd Murphy

Todd Murphy was born on July 28, 1962, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up partly in rural Georgia. He studied art at the University of Georgia in the 1980s; no specific degree or graduation year is documented in available sources.

He launched his career in Atlanta after leaving the University of Georgia. His work combined photography, painting, collage, sculpture, and film, often built around recurring motifs such as dresses, horses and other animals, and narratives drawn from Southern and American history. He lived and worked across Brooklyn, New York, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Atlanta, Georgia, and served as a visiting artist and lecturer at institutions including the University of Georgia, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Virginia, and the University of South Carolina.

Murphy died on February 3, 2020, in New York, at the age of 57, from cancer. He was survived by his wife, Liane Murphy, and their five children. Liane Murphy now stewards his archive and legacy, and the estate is represented by Johnson Lowe Gallery in Atlanta (formerly Bill Lowe Gallery), which has organized two posthumous solo exhibitions to date, "Wink" in 2022 and "Voyager" in 2025 to 2026.

Critical attention to Murphy's work in the available record centers on his 2022 posthumous exhibition "Wink" at Bill Lowe Gallery (now Johnson Lowe Gallery), a survey of his final decade of work built around the long overlooked history of Black jockeys in American horse racing. The exhibition was reviewed by ArtsATL and covered by Atlanta Magazine, both of which framed Murphy as an artist using layered, historically grounded imagery to recover overlooked chapters of American history.

As of 2026-07-18, no verified public auction result for a work by Todd Murphy could be confirmed, and no single sale can be documented as an all-time auction high with a work title, price, house, and date. Two works, "Portrait of Elton" (1994) and "the Beautiful South" (1994), appear as documented Christie's lots attributed to the artist, but no confirmed hammer price or sale date is available in current sources. A separate online marketplace listing for the mixed-media work "Dress Straw" cites private sale figures as high as USD 195,000, but this is a dealer claim on a resale platform rather than a documented, independently verified transaction, and should be treated with caution.

Murphy's market is thin and not yet well documented at public auction, so collectors should rely primarily on the artist's estate and Johnson Lowe Gallery for provenance and authentication rather than on marketplace listings, which can carry unverified pricing claims. There is no catalogue raisonne. His standing rests more on museum collections, including the High Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Mint Museum, than on a deep or continuous auction history. Posthumous gallery exhibitions in 2022 and 2025 to 2026 suggest an active effort to build market visibility, but any pricing decision should account for the current scarcity of confirmed public sale data.