SCHAPIRO, “Female Concerns,” 1976-77

Miriam Schapiro (American 1923-2015)

“A decade of personal and political struggle with feminist issues crystallized in Schapiro’s pioneering and collaborative involvement in Womanhouse. Co-directing the Feminist Art Program with Judy Chicago in 1970, together they began the school year involving students in a project to allow them to project their dreams and fantasies by creating an exclusively female environment in an old house. After renovating the building they transformed it with performance and art dealing with specifically feminist issues as a means of restructuring their identities as women artists in a patriarchal art world. Schapiro has given the history of women’s ‘covert’ art a brightly lit showcase. Once-tabooed scraps; sequins, buttons, threads, rickrack, spangles, yarn; silk, taffeta, cotton, burlap, and wool, excavated from musty attics and dredged from dark closets of art history are assembled and coordinated with emotional and creative thought into ‘femmages.’ Schapiro reeducates us about a history of buried art, women’s art.”                                                 Elise LaRose

Awards

Tamarind Fellowship

Ford Foundation Grant

National Endowment of the Art

Yaddo Felllowship

Teaching

State University of Iowa

Parsons School of Design, NYC

University of California

California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia.

Collections

Museum of Modern Art, N. Y.

Whitney Museum

Hirshhorn Museum

Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Bibliography

Rosen, Randy and Brawer, Catherine. Making Their Mark; Women Artist Move Into the Mainstream, 1970-85. Abbeville Press, NY, 1989

Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Artists; from Early Times to the Present. Avon Books, NY, 1982

Gauma-Peterson, Thalia. “The Theater of Life an Illusion in Miram Schapiro’s Recent Work.” Arts Magazine, March 1986

Cummings, Paul. Dictionary of Contemporary American Artists, Fifth Edition. St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1988

Emanuel, Muriel et al, eds. Contemporary Artists. St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan, NY, 1983