About
AÍFE MURRAY tells stories that have been erased or covered over – via artists books; writing; installation; talks; performance & map making.
Aífe [ee-fah] is the author of Maid as Muse: how servants changed Emily Dickinson’s life and language which was a finalist for the 2011 Northern California Book Award in General Nonfiction.
Maid as Muse is the final piece of a multi-form project, Kitchen Table Poetics, for which Aífe conceived and has led public walking tours of Amherst from the Dickinson servants’ perspective. She created a mixed media installation and public art for The Mead Museum’s Word As Object: Emily Dickinson & Contemporary Art, for which she collaborated with the Dickinson Museum’s house cleaners and gardeners on the artists’ book Art of Service.
She has been in-residence at the Emily Dickinson Museum; was an affiliated scholar with Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Gender; the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation Fellow at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; and named the 2007 Scholar in Amherst by the Emily Dickinson International Society.
Aífe is currently working on a book about her grandmother going toe to toe with the Ku Klux Klan. She was awarded a research fellowship by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History and writing fellowships at the Millay Colony, where she was the Corrine Steel & Synnova Bay Hayes Fellow, and at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers. In addition to a book, the Stand Up and Be Counted project will include a digital learning site about the 1920s Klan, women racists, and white working class civil rights activism.
it all began in the public library