W. Patrick Murphy is a career diplomat, not a curator. But that hasn’t stopped the 57-year-old from Brattleboro from assembling a Vermont art show of particular note — and not simply because it’s on exhibit halfway around the world.
It all began when Murphy, an expert on Asian affairs, became U.S. ambassador to Cambodia in 2019.
“There’s a lot of wall space,” he remembered thinking upon seeing his official residence in the capital of Phnom Penh.
Enter the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program, which displays American works in diplomatic facilities globally. Murphy and his wife, fellow New Englander Kathleen Norman, helped experts assemble paintings, photographs and textiles that spotlight the Green Mountain State.
“Vermont being smaller, it needs a little explanation for many Cambodians,” Murphy said in a recent interview. “But there are some of our political figures and products that are pretty well known.”
That includes U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream — the latter sold in cartons picturing green grass and blue sky.
“Cambodia doesn’t experience winter — this is the tropics — but there are some visible similarities with Vermont,” Murphy said. “Both have an agrarian tradition with countryside being very important, so we chose works that exemplify that.”
Take landscapes by artists Kate Emlen of Norwich, Julia Jensen and Deborah Lazar of Putney, and Paul Stone of Dummerston, as well as textile creations by Elizabeth Fram of Waterbury and Bhakti Ziek of Randolph.
“So much of human history and experience is embedded in one’s surroundings,” Stone is quoted as saying in the exhibit’s catalog. “Indeed, what memories do our landscapes hold?”
The show features a rare lithograph by the late American folk artist Grandma Moses, who Murphy discovered through childhood trips to the Bennington Museum and its largest public collection of her work.
There’s also a print by the late Brattleboro colorist Wolf Kahn, who received the State Department’s International Medal of Arts shortly before his death last year.
“His works are quite valuable and becoming more so — to the point our curators could not find a piece that was available,” Murphy said. “Then, much to our surprise, we discovered one already had been procured for the embassy’s permanent collection.”
Murphy’s interest in public service dates back to his Brattleboro Union High School days participating in model assemblies, Boys State and Boys Nation — the latter in which he met then-President Jimmy Carter before reuniting 16 years later on the job.
Going on to the University of Vermont and the Peace Corps, Murphy earned a graduate degree from the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies before joining the U.S. Foreign Service in 1992.
Serving under six presidents, he has conducted work in English, Burmese, Cantonese, French, and a bit of Thai and Khmer. But his main language is diplomacy. He demonstrated that just after the 2016 presidential election when he returned to his hometown, where only 15 percent of the electorate voted for Donald Trump.
“As career foreign service officers,” he told the Windham World Affairs Council, “we’re nonpartisan.”
Murphy is saying the same thing with the arrival of Joe Biden, although he will confirm he has heard support for United States reengagement with the World Health Organization and Paris climate agreement.
“All of these decisions are very, very well received in a region that benefits from international organizations,” he said. “Our democracy faced some challenges in recent times, but I think we’ve come out better for it.”
Cambodia itself is going through what Murphy calls “backsliding,” as its increasingly authoritarian government retreats from a United Nations-sponsored transition to democracy and sidles up to regional superpower China. The country also continues to recover from the Khmer Rouge regime that killed nearly 2 million people from 1975 to 1979.
“The art scene was completely destroyed when artists, musicians, dancers by and large were exterminated,” Murphy said. “There has been an enormous effort over the last 30 years to bring back traditions that go back centuries.”
The Vermonter has found a surprising ally in that work.
“Hello, Mr. Ambassador,” he recalled one man saying upon his arrival. “I’m from your home state.”
That man, Arn Chorn-Pond, is a genocide survivor who found refuge with an adoptive family in New England and returned to Phnom Penh to found the nonprofit organization Cambodian Living Arts.
“Even today, we fail to notice that the image of Cambodia is so much more than just the Killing Fields,” Chorn-Pond wrote on the organization’s website. “This is one small effort to rework this image of Cambodia — to instead, give something to people that they can remember, to better ourselves as a community.”
The ambassador’s Vermont exhibit will remain on display until the end of his three-year Cambodia assignment in 2022.
“Art transcends geographical borders and connects us to our origins and roots,” Murphy said. “We are enormously appreciative of the participating artists. Packing up their precious works and sending them off to a distant land is a leap of faith.”
Or perhaps something else. After seeing a Stone painting in his office, Murphy learned the artist is the father of two of his high school classmates.
“It’s just kind of happenstance,” the ambassador said, “but it’s a small world.”
