One of her first mature works included Children Meeting, 1978 (now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum), an oil on canvas painting evoking human characteristics, personalities, or pure feeling through an interaction of non-figurative shapes, colour and lines.

[12] This grant led directly to opening of the Bowery Poetry Club, a Lower East Side performance arts venue run by her husband, Bob Holman.

[14] The retrospective was widely praised, with The New York Times noting that by the end of the exhibition, "You're left with the sense of an artist in the flush of her authority and still digging deep.

In her obituary, The New York Times wrote that Murray "reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself ..."[1] The Bowery Poetry Club held a Praise Day in her honor on August 30, 2007, with artists Brice Marden and Joel Shapiro, writers Jessica Hagedorn and Patricia Spears Jones, and choreographers Elizabeth Streb and Yoshiko Chuma among the attendees; Artforum described the event as "a blend of the poignant and the comic that threatened to bring it closer to a Saturday Night Live skit shredding avant-garde performance practice than an actual art-world remembrance.

[1] Murray’s curatorial gesture would seem to have constituted a partial change of heart from her... previously self-contained feminism.

It is important, though that her strategy for convincing was exhibiting––bringing images out of the shadows... As with the Abstract Expressionist record, so with MoMA, where far more works by women sit in storage than are on display.After Murray's death, the A. G. Foundation, Columbia University, and the Archives of American Art established the "Elizabeth Murray Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts Project," to honor her memory.

The residency is an immersive, supportive, productive, and communal atmosphere for art-making and dialogue on a bucolic 77-acre farm in Washington County, NY.

In 2017, the Murray-Holman family partnered with Collar Works to design a summer residency program for visual artists.

The family felt that the creative use of the property and natural surroundings would carry on Elizabeth Murray's legacy.