Few people can say they changed the way Durango residents see their city.
Tom McMurray, a prolific painter whose murals ennobled the sprawling brick walls of some of downtown Durango’s oldest buildings, literally did so.
McMurray, who was born Sept. 14, 1945, the youngest child of Homer and Edith McMurray’s 14 children in Youngstown, Ohio, recently died of complications relating to early-onset Alzheimer’s in Huntington, N.Y., on July 2, 2013. He was 67.
In an artistic career that spanned nearly five decades and many cities throughout the country, McMurray’s family said he first found fame not through his true passion, abstract painting, but for a series of six large murals he started painting in Durango in 1980.
Of these, perhaps the most iconic is his mural depicting the heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey’s 1915 fight against Andy Malloy, which McMurray painted on the side of El Rancho Tavern at 10th Street and Main Avenue, though the fight actually took place across the street in the space formerly occupied by the Gem Theater, where Jarvis Condos now stand.
Tourists may be more familiar with the 1981 mural he painted on the wall of the building that now is home to Jean-Pierre “Le Cafe Chic” & Wine Bar, a French eatery at Sixth Street and Main Avenue, depicting life in late 19th-century Durango. In his rendering of “Durango’s Main St.” circa 1890, horses handily outnumber the city’s few people, and most of the city’s buildings are colored brown, like the mountain they sit uneasily atop, with the sky providing a bright streak of blue. He based the mural on a black-and-white photograph that he saw hanging in the old Schulter Floral Shop in 1978.
Though McMurray’s murals initially offended Durango’s Design Review Board, which viewed murals as a suspicious artistic medium with big-city roots, by the late 1990s, the city of Durango came to fully embrace McMurray’s vision of public art, and since has amassed a collection of works that recently was appraised as being worth more than $1 million.
McMurray graduated from Boardman High School in Ohio in 1963 and from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1968, where he was enrolled on “probationary terms because of his lack of art background,” according to his daughters Kelsey LaPort and Glennis McCarthy. There, “he stunned his friends and family when he won first place in an art show in 1966 that included works by his instructors,” they said.
McMurray lived in Durango from 1977 to 2006. In addition to the murals he painted in Durango, LaPort and McCarthy said McMurray worked as director of the Cleveland Institute’s galleries, painted the posters commemorating the seventh and eighth annual Telluride Bluegrass Festivals and operated a graphic design studio for more than a decade.
LaPort and McCarthy remember their father as an avid gardener who loved coffee, cooking and watching old movies. Though they said McMurray was an “amazingly charismatic person who was always cracking jokes,” being the youngest of 14 children, they recalled he also “savored being alone.”
They said McMurray was “diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2005, just a short time after he finished repainting the Jack Dempsey mural with his nephew and close friend Jim McCliment. Unfortunately, one of the first skills he lost from the disease was the ability to create art, which broke his heart.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
Memorial service
Thomas “Tom” McMurray was born Sept. 14, 1945, to Homer and Edith McMurray
McMurray married Mary Young in 1967 in Watertown, Conn. They divorced in 1976.
He later married Callie Miller in Durango in 1978. They had two daughters before divorcing in 1989.
McMurray is survived by daughters Kelsey LaPort of Long Island, N.Y.; Glennis McCarthy of Los Angeles; brothers Homer Jr. “Mac” McMurray of Andover, Mass.; Robert “Bob” McMurray of Duluth, Ga.; James “Jim” McMurray of Youngstown, Ohio; Joseph “Joe” McMurray of Boardman, Ohio; Dean McMurray of Naples, Fla.; sisters Patricia “Patty” Spencer of Roswell Ga.; and Sandra “Cookie” Swartz of Tobaccoville, N.C.; and a grandchild.
A celebration of McMurray’s life was held July 14 in Putney, Vt. His daughters said they would spread his ashes on a road trip during which they’ll seek out the most beautiful places in the United States.
His daughters said friends and family could donate to Alzheimer’s research in their father’s honor by visiting “Donate to Donate” on Facebook.
