How a Remedial Math Tool Ended Up at the Whitney

In 1979, the artist James Inoli Murphy tried out the idea of using string figures—those cat’s-cradle games of loops and knots—to teach math to recalcitrant students. “It is a pleasure, it is an active meditation, and it is an entire ballet—a hand dance that you are doing,” he said the other day, slipping a string off his wrist and sliding it around his crooked fingers. The students in the remedial Topics in Math class that he taught at LaGuardia, the city’s performing-arts high school, took to the approach. “The dance department fell in love with me,” he said. Murphy, who is Cherokee and wears his hair in a long white ponytail, retired from full-time teaching in 1996, but never stopped making string figures. A few years ago, he began using a spray-on acrylic fixative to preserve them. During the pandemic, he estimated, he made about fifteen hundred figures in his Upper West Side apartment. He photographed them and began digitally stitching the images together to form constellations of figures that zoom out to reveal patterns—sinewy loops becoming a field of lace that expands into an amoeba-like colony of bulbous organisms. “These are like little sacred clowns for me,” he said, flipping through the photographs on an iPad. His string creations recently found a wider audience when the Whitney Museum asked him to lead a family workshop, part of the programming connected to “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith,” an exhibition of the work of the Beat polymath, which includes some of Smith’s own string figures. Murphy, who is eighty-five, arrived at the museum dressed in mismatched socks that coördinated with strings wrapped around his wrists. He knew Smith in the old days; the workshop would teach people how to make some basic string forms. “This is not my art that I’m showing here. That’s my art,” he said pointing to the iPad. But, as an educator, he said, “this is the culmination of what I’ve been trying to do.” Families sprawled on rugs were already fiddling with museum-issued strings. The grownups squinted in confusion, while […]

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