How Chris Murray Melded Photography & Rock ’n’ Roll into High Art

Tall and lanky, with a gray rock ’n’ roll mop—he would not look out of place in a Nick Lowe lookalike lineup—Murray, 77, was born and raised in the Bronx, fifth of six children in an Irish Catholic family headed by former seminarian-turned-lawyer-and-entrepreneur Matthew Murray. Matthew and spouse Rita Donovan Brown met as colleagues teaching at St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf in the Bronx. The family economy ran on Matthew’s mid-life business success after he and a partner landed the public parking contract for the Belmont horseracing track, which in pre-off-track-betting days was a license to print simoleons because to place bets railbirds had to come to the track.

Chris, his four brothers and their sister attended parochial elementary and secondary schools in their home borough and Catholic colleges in the nation’s capital. Older brother Matthew, as a high-school student at Fordham Prep, recognized in Chris, six, a nascent rock ’n’ roll fan, steeping his younger brother in the Sun Records catalogue.

Chris didn’t know exactly why Elvis Presley and company so thoroughly moved him until the afternoon in June 1964 that he saw the blues-saturated Rolling Stones at Carnegie Hall, their first-ever American show. Besides embracing the blues, Chris reveled in the British Invasion and enjoyed the Beach Boys. As a teen at Loyola School, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he and classmate John Zambetti founded the Malibooz, a surf band that played the NYC and Long Island teen club circuit, with Chris on rhythm guitar and vocals and John playing lead. They even released a single. Chris penned lyrics titled “Goin’ to Malibu” that John set to music. The 45 hit hard enough that Rhino Music sells it on a compilation surf CD. (The group, which still performs, came to include Loyola alum Walter Egan, remembered in DC as a pillar of ’70s-era local heroes Sageworth & Drums and for his hit 1978 solo single, “Magnet and Steel.”)

In September 1965, accompanying brother Peter, a junior, Georgetown University freshman Chris Murray arrived on the campus from which siblings Matthew and Tom had graduated. Sister Rita had gotten her diploma across town from Trinity College. Youngest brother Vincent would graduate from Georgetown in 1973.

As he had at Loyola, Chris quickly made friendships, such as with fellow New Yorkers Glenn O’Brien, Michael Netter and Bob Colacello. He threw in with the peace movement, marching against the American project in Vietnam while exploring the counterculture and its music. When psychedelic folkie Donovan played DC, Chris and pals were there, after the show figuring out where the performer was bunking and rapping on the musician’s hotel room door, to be welcomed by his father. Donovan introduced Chris to transcendental meditation. They’re still close. Another night the performer answering the knock was pyrotechnic guitar slinger Jimi Hendrix. To finance his concert-going and other adventures Chris pumped gas at Ladd Mills’s Esso service station at Wisconsin Avenue and Q Street NW and waited tables at the Whiskey a Go Go on M Street NW.

One day in Dumbarton Oaks park he met artist Kim Waters, who had grown up in Georgetown. They fell for one another and wed in 1969 on the heels of Chris’s graduation with a degree in philosophy.

In 1971, the couple and friends crossed the continent from Prince Edward Island to the West Coast in a repurposed sixty-nine-passenger school bus, fetching up in Berkeley, California, for a year before returning to DC, which had begun to start to feel like home. Rents were low, living was somehow easier. Chris and Kim set up housekeeping in Georgetown, then Burleith and then Palisades. Amiably scorning the careerist path, Chris took odd jobs: driving a bus for Georgetown Day School; serving as assistant manager at Gazang, the city’s first organic grocery, on M Street NW; working the register and curating the book stall at the town’s second organic grocery, Yes!, on 31st Street below the C&O Canal, until the owner promoted him to running a bookstore he’d opened next door, expanding the Yes! brand.

Yes! Bookstore stocked many volumes on meditation, rekindling the interest triggered by Donovan. Chris began reading, which led him to the Bhagavad Gita, the mainspring scripture of Hinduism. That faith, which holds cows sacred, worships the deity Krishna, who has many forms and many names. Because in youth Krishna was a cowherd, one of his names is Govinda, which in Sanskrit means “protector of cows.”

Chris took up yoga and meditation. He and Kim and their friend Howie Carr, a DC artist, organized themselves into an acoustic trio with Chris on Appalachian dulcimer, Kim on bells and Howie playing hand drums. In 1972, instruments in tow, they went to Europe. Howie, another fellow with a gift for making friends, knew legendary artist Salvador Dali. In a VW bug lacking a rear seat, they set out from Munich, Germany. With Chris, the only participant holding a driving license, at the wheel, the trio headed to Spain hoping to connect with Dali. In the Costa Brava, they found him in his studio, at work on a canvas of Christopher Columbus arriving onshore in the New World. The Surrealist master welcomed his young friend Howie and Howie’s friends. They reciprocated with a brief musical performance, inspiring Dali to engage them as the entertainment for guests he invited each evening for cocktails at his swimming pool. Their run as Dali’s house band lasted six weeks. After a few additional months of roaming Europe and Morocco that included the memorable sight of small, welcoming storefronts dotting London’s side streets and Amsterdam’s canals, the three returned to DC, soon enjoying a brief reunion with Dali in New York City. On the same foray to NYC, Chris looked up his Georgetown buddies, who were now working for the pop artist Andy Warhol.

An inkling beckoned to Chris, a sense of wanting to live an artistic life. He was married to an artist, his closest friends were artists, he treasured visiting galleries and talking seriously about art. He enjoyed everything about art except for making it himself. How could he turn sensibility into dollars and cents?

In June 1975, back in the Georgetown Day School bus saddle, Chris saw a “For Rent” sign on a building at Prospect and 34th Streets NW. He inquired. The vacant space, one of several carved out of the property, which included a laundry and an art restoration shop, was small but pleasant. The rent was $200 a month. Chris didn’t know what in the world he’d do with the space but rented it anyway.

Then it came to him: Open a gallery. Join the fray. There was no Federal Bureau of Gallerism to tell him no. Make it up as you go along. That was easy, now for the hard part: What to call the operation. He couldn’t buy the tried and true last-name gambit. Maybe Leo Castelli could get away with “Castelli,” but hanging “Murray” on a shingle sounded like an homage to a lesser character in the cast of The Odd Couple. He pondered, arriving at a topic from his religious readings. Hinduism posits that to say Krishna’s name is to bring spiritual benefit, a blessing, a spiritual vibration that broadcasts Krishna consciousness. “Govinda Gallery.” Okay.

The first artist to show at the Govinda was Kim. A subsequent hanging featured handwoven fabrics from Peru and Bolivia, and who should come by but the Bolivian ambassador, an auspicious moment. Chris showed visionary art, he showed prints. Drawings. Five years went by in a blink, a series of blinks really, including a show of Andy Warhol’s work facilitated by the O’Brien/Netter/Colacello connection. The theme was “Endangered Species”; the prints sold out at $1,500 apiece (lately resales have been in the $150,000 range). Andy had a blast. More Warhol shows at Govinda followed. When Andy came to DC, Chris sometimes chauffeured him and Colacello around in his ’61 Chrysler. The Govinda showed sports photography, including a trove of images by Howard Bingham that brought Mister GOAT himself, Muhammad Ali, to the gallery. Chris had another idea: a book of illuminated illustrations of passages in the Bhagavad Gita. Kim set to work. It took five years but finally she finished, and Harper published the book and it was fabulous, spinning another thread in the fabric that was Chris Murray.

Scanning a newspaper, Chris saw a squib reporting that Annie Leibovitz, the reigning queen of rock ’n’ roll photography, was leaving her sinecure at Rolling Stone and bringing out a book of photos from her long and variegated career. Chris thought, “Gee, I’d like to show Annie’s pictures … .” Voilà: an epochal experience that changed his life.

Twenty years passed. Kim and Chris brought son David into the world in 1982 but later split up, no longer married but still good friends. Chris met and fell in love with another artist, Carlotta Hester. They married. A few years ago, they collaborated on The Pure Drop, a moving book of Carlotta’s evocative drawings of Irish traditional musicians with a foreword by the novelist Alice McDermott and an introduction by Chris Murray. Even though the Govinda Gallery as an address on 34th Street NW is gone, gone gone, the Govinda machine with Chris Murray at the controls is still moving the merchandise.