Lawyer, Novelist, Critic: Yxta Maya Murray Doesn’t Just Stay in One Lane
This image of Young Joon Kwak of Xina Xurner performing at Human Resources, 2018, is on the cover of Yxta Maya Murray's book We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law. Photo by Katie Stenberg.
We live in an era of specialty, a time of the hyper-focused expert—the journalist who writes exclusively about artificial intelligence, the vlogger who can describe every ride at Disney in great detail. Yxta Maya Murray, 56, is not one of those people. A Los Angeles lawyer and legal scholar (she’s on the faculty at Loyola Marymount University), Murray is a writer of polymathic interests. She produced analyses for legal journals; she has written art criticism for Artforum and Artillery. Since 1998, she has also published an impressive number of novels—eight!—with another on the way. Murray draws from an eclectic array of subjects, including Mexican colonial chronicles and a partial nuclear meltdown at a Southern California laboratory in the 1950s.
Now Murray is weaving together two strands from her intellectual universe—art and law—into a single book: We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law, released by Cornell University Press. The book explores the ways that activist artists (“artivists”) have challenged the law—whether by breaking it or critiquing it conceptually. “Art research,” she writes, “can give rise to jurisprudential reflection.”
For the author, the book marks a culmination. “I kept on writing about artists whose work looked like civil rights activism,” she says. “They were monitoring institutions and they were delivering mutual aid and they were protesting and filing petitions and some of them were getting into litigation—and I realized that that hadn’t been tracked.”
Artist and poet Anaïs Duplan. Photo courtesy of Ally Caple.
We Make Each Other Beautiful looks at how artists have brought attention to accessibility at the U.S-Mexico border and government neglect in post-Katrina New Orleans. An early chapter—which began as a paper for Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left—examines how conceptualist Carrie Mae Weems willfully defied the contractual and intellectual property claims of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University in the creation of her celebrated 1995–1996 work, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. (In that case, the artist used images of daguerreotypes of enslaved laborers from the Peabody’s archive without permission. The university threatened to sue; Weems said she welcomed a public debate about who should control images of the enslaved. Harvard backed off.)
Weems’s piece has long enthralled Murray. “It brings you to your knees,” she says. As a lawyer, she was also struck by the way Weems’ appropriation challenged the basis of law. “She was threatening the whole system of intellectual property and real property,” Murray adds. “She was like, why don’t you sue me and we can have a conversation about who should control this.”
“Art research can give rise to jurisprudential reflection.”
The essay on Weems is a trenchant examination of legal principles versus moral ones. It is also probing and empathetic. “Was she seeking to tear the whole system down?” Murray asks in the essay. “Was she convinced that she could use the images because Harvard owned them, because she partly owned them, because Black people generally owned them, or because no one owned them?”
Murray’s work straddles many areas, but it frequently orbits around social justice. And the roots of that interest lie, to some degree, in the stories that women in her family carry with them.
Born in Lakewood and raised in Long Beach, Yxta Maya Murray is the only daughter of a Canadian father who worked in imports and a Mexican mother who taught middle school Spanish. We Make Each Other Beautiful poignantly delves into her Mexican grandmother’s painful immigration story and finds a way to connect her grandmother’s informal decorative practices with the actions undertaken by some of the artists she covers. “It wasn’t until much later that I realized that my grandmother was an artist and hers was an activist art dedicated to her personal survival,” Murray writes, “as well as that of my mother and me.”
On a sunny Friday afternoon, I find Murray seated in a bright dress at Aroma Coffee and Tea in Studio City, the Los Angeles neighborhood where she now lives, and a spot where she goes to gather her thoughts while writing. This voracious writer is also a voracious reader—recently completing Nobel Prize-winner Jon Fosse’s Septology series. Her love of reading began when she was a young girl. “My library was Long Beach garage sales. Stephen King. The Bourne Identity books. I just read and read,” she says. A formative work? James Clavell’s Shogun, she admits with a laugh. “All I can remember is he identified this erotic part of a woman’s neck above a kimono and I was like, ‘I’m going to be an English major.’”
Murray ultimately did study English, receiving her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989, where she wrote her thesis about poet Wallace Stevens (who also studied law). But afterward, she set literature aside to pursue a law degree at Stanford University—mainly, for practical reasons: “My family had such difficult times in their earlier lives. I was always afraid of winding up on the street. . . So I applied to law school because lawyers got good jobs and they were Supreme Court justices and they did important things.”
Artist and activist Tanya Aguiñiga, 2020. Copyright Gina Clyne.
Artist and activist Tanya Aguiñiga, 2020. Copyright Gina Clyne.
Ironically, the practice of law led back to letters. After receiving her degree from Stanford in 1993, she clerked for a pair of judges in Los Angeles. She was struck by the process of allocution, in which a defendant can make a statement to the court after being found guilty. “It was men of color, some poor white men, and they would stand in front of the court and tell their stories before they were sentenced to 15 years or 20 years,” she recalls. “I felt a lot of. . . anxiety to self-loathing for participating in this process when so many came from such difficult circumstances.”
Her first novel, Locas (1998), drew from those hardscrabble stories, along with similar ones she heard from women in her family. (“Mama likes to say that we started here From Scratch. Like a cake,” relates a gangbanger named Cecilia in the novel’s opening pages. “She’s short and brown just like me, with flat hands and feet.”)
In 1995, Murray joined the faculty at Loyola Marymount University, where she is now a tenured professor, teaching courses on criminal and property law, as well as gender and the law. Since then, she has been staggeringly prolific. In September, she will publish her ninth novel, A History of Hazardous Objects, with University of Nevada Press—about a Latina radar astronomer at NASA tasked with keeping an eye on the sky for potentially cataclysmic events. And she is already at work on novel No. 10, tentatively titled Central Valley, which will grapple with environmental degradation around Bakersfield.
There was a period in which Murray did not write. In 2015, as she was battling cancer, a colleague in the publishing industry assaulted her—events that left her demoralized and physically weakened. After a particularly devastating hospital stay, where she had been unable to eat or drink anything for five days, she remembers sitting on her couch, fixating on the idea of drinking a Slushee, and wondering if this was rock bottom. In her haze, she says she told herself, “You should just write. . . It doesn’t matter if you fail or if no one publishes you.”
By the following year, she had published her first piece of art criticism in Artillery — about an exhibition of abstractionist Agnes Martin’s work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (and the way the show elided questions about Martin’s mental health and her lesbian love affairs). Tulsa Kinney, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, says she was bowled over by Murray’s submission. “She came out of nowhere,” she recalls. “And she wrote this first review and I was like, ‘Who is this?’ It was flawless.”
Murray, now cancer-free for nine years, has extended her reach into other areas—like painting. “I paint so I can write about it,” she says. “So that I could know how hard it is to paint the simplest thing. So that I could keep that knowledge in my heart when I critique someone.” She creates abstractions inspired by patterns that she draws from historical images, like the pattern of a tie Frederick Douglass once wore, or the upholstery in a portrait of Colette.
Next year, her paintings will appear in a group show in Santa Fe. She’ll also be on sabbatical from teaching at Loyola Marymount. That doesn’t mean she’ll be lying fallow. On the agenda is Central Valley, which she’ll be working on as a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge. And, of course, there’s always the possibility that she finds another area of culture to explore. Murray is not the sort of intellectual to ever stay in one lane.
Carolina A. Miranda is an independent culture writer based in Los Angeles.