McMurray Art League upcoming events

CAFE: China Painting with Jan and Sandy (Saturday, November 14, 2026)

Sat, 14 Nov 2026 18:00:00 GMT

Work with donated china pieces to make a masterpiece! Paints and china pieces provided for free! Or bring your own china pieces! Bring some small brushes if you have them. The paint is water-soluble.

A $5 donation is requested.

You can paint anything you want but here's what Sandy and Jan did for practice. Bring a flat box to carry your wet pieces home as they need to dry for 24 hours before baking in your home oven. Instructions will be provided.

MAL Book Club: "Stealing Athena" (Wednesday, November 18, 2026)

Wed, 18 Nov 2026 19:00:00 GMT

Please join Marlene Boas and Jan Pini for the next meeting of the MAL Art and Artists Book Club! Come even if you haven't read the book!

Note the new time of 2:00 for this month!

We will meet to discuss "Stealing Athena" by Karen Essex.

Feel free to read the book and add to the discussion. And bring friends and snacks! A voluntary donation of $5 is requested.

Here's Amazon's synopsis:

For two hundred years, the Elgin Marbles or Parthenon Sculptures have stood in the British Museum at the center of a global debate. In Stealing Athena, Karen Essex tells their story through two remarkable women divided by centuries but united by ambition.

At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, young Mary Nisbet, Countess of Elgin, uses charm and daring in Constantinople on the Sultan himself to help secure permission for her husband’s goal strip the Parthenon of its treasures.

Two thousand years earlier, Aspasia, philosopher, courtesan, and partner to Athens’s most powerful man, Pericles, plays a key role as the city builds glorious monuments destined to change history.

Rich with romance, intrigue, scandal, mythology, and high stakes, Stealing Athena brings two hidden women behind history’s headlines brilliantly to life.

MAL Book Club: "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos" (Wednesday, December 16, 2026)

Wed, 16 Dec 2026 20:00:00 GMT

Please join Marlene Boas and Jan Pini for the next meeting of the MAL Art and Artists Book Club! Come even if you haven't read the book!

Note that we're back to the time of 3:00 for this month!

We will meet to discuss "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos" by Dominic Smith.

Feel free to read the book and add to the discussion. And bring friends and snacks! A voluntary donation of $5 is requested.

Here's Amazon's synopsis:

Amsterdam, 1631: Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the city's Guild of St. Luke. Though women do not paint landscapes (they are generally restricted to indoor subjects), a wintry outdoor scene haunts Sara: She cannot shake the image of a young girl from a nearby village, standing alone beside a silver birch at dusk, staring out at a group of skaters on the frozen river below. Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it.
New York City, 1957: The only known surviving work of Sara de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood, hangs in the bedroom of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, Marty de Groot, a descendant of the original owner. It is a beautiful but comfortless landscape. The lawyer's marriage is prominent but comfortless, too. When a struggling art history grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to forge the painting for a dubious art dealer, she finds herself entangled with its owner in ways no one could predict.
Sydney, 2000: Now a celebrated art historian and curator, Ellie Shipley is mounting an exhibition in her field of specialization: female painters of the Dutch Golden Age. When it becomes apparent that both the original At the Edge of a Wood and her forgery are en route to her museum, the life she has carefully constructed threatens to unravel entirely and irrevocably.

MAL Book Club: "Ninth Street Women" Part I (Wednesday, January 20, 2027)

Wed, 20 Jan 2027 20:00:00 GMT

Please join Marlene Boas and Jan Pini for the next meeting of the MAL Art and Artists Book Club! Come even if you haven't read the book!

Note that we're back to the time of 3:00 for this month!

We will meet to discuss Part I of "Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine De Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthatler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art" by Mary Gabriel.

Feel free to read the book and add to the discussion. And bring friends and snacks! A voluntary donation of $5 is requested.

Here's Amazon's synopsis:

Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting -- not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come.

MAL Book Club: "Ninth Street Women" Part II (Wednesday, February 17, 2027)

Wed, 17 Feb 2027 20:00:00 GMT

Please join Marlene Boas and Jan Pini for the next meeting of the MAL Art and Artists Book Club! Come even if you haven't read the book!

Note that we're back to the time of 3:00 for this month!

We will meet to discuss Part II of "Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine De Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthatler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art" by Mary Gabriel.

Feel free to read the book and add to the discussion. And bring friends and snacks! A voluntary donation of $5 is requested.

Here's Amazon's synopsis: