MIRIAM SCHAPIRO
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Biography • Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015)
Miriam Schapiro is identified as a leader of both the Feminist Art Movement and the Pattern and Decoration Group. She was born into a creative family of Russian-Jewish heritage that supported her desire at a young age to become an artist. Her father was an artist and industrial designer, who began teaching her art at a young age. At fourteen, she enrolled in WPA evening classes to study the nude model. She also had the opportunity to attend Saturday classes at the Museum of Modern Art. Schapiro started at Hunter College, majoring in art, then transferred to the University of Iowa (BA 1945; MA in printmaking, 1946; MFA in painting, 1949). At Iowa she studied with Argentine printmaker Mauricio Lasansky and became his first assistant. She also helped to establish the Iowa Print Group.
Schapiro lived in Missouri from 1950 to 1952 where her husband Paul Brach had his first teaching position. The couple returned to New York where Schapiro established herself as an artist and was represented by Andre Emmerich. Schapiro and her husband Paul Brach moved to La Jolla in 1967 when Brach became the first chairman of the University of California, San Diego art department. While there, Schapiro met physicist David Nabilof, a computer expert at General Dynamics. With Nalibof, she began to collaborate on computer-aided preliminary sketches for her increasingly hard-edged paintings. Schapiro used the computer to plot every point in her simple geometric drawings and collages in digital space and then manipulated the compositions virtually. The process offered infinite variations on her visual concepts and allowed her to see space in a new way.
Schapiro and Brach next moved to the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, outside Los Angeles. There Brach was the dean and Schapiro was a faculty member. Having seen Judy Chicago teach at Fresno State College, Schapiro recruited her to come to CalArts. Along with 21 students, they create Womanhouse, a converted home filled with art installations and performances which became a significant project for Feminist art. The program’s goal was to encourage female artists to relate their lives, experiences, and fantasies to their work by using ordinary materials around them. Womanhouse moved Schapiro from the technological world of computers into women’s decoration.
Back in New York in 1975, Schapiro's investigations into women's traditional art inspired her "femmages," an early example in our exhibition is Tidy House, 1976. Her exhibition Anatomy of a Kimono at the Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York in 1976 helped establish the decorative as a respectable force in the visual arts. In 1976 she participated in informal meetings with a group of artists including Robert Zakanitch, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Tony Robbins, Valerie Jaudon, and critic Amy Goldin. They formed the Pattern and Decoration Group with the purpose to merge modernist art traditions with motifs from traditional women’s crafts, folk art, and ethnic traditions to express humanistic and decorative themes that had been excluded from modernism. The group quickly received museum recognition including: Pattern Painting, PS 1 Art Center, Long Island City, NY, 1977; Patterning Painting, Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium, 1978; and The Decorative Impulse, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Philadelphia, PA, 1979.
Miriam Schapiro traveled extensively as a visiting artist, delivering lectures and helping to promote the women's art movement. She was a founding member of the Heresies Collective, a women’s group that published the periodical Heresies. A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977-1993). She worked with shapes associated with the feminine, such as hearts, kimonos, and fans. She saw the fan as a feminine accessory that is both functional and flirty. She transformed its form into a minimalist shaped canvas as a monument to the decorative. Schapiro was interested in the interplay of order and chaos, filling her canvases with collaged fabric that feels maximalist yet remains restrained enough to remain tasteful. Schapiro embraced the use of the word decorative as “an homage to anonymous decorators of the past, artist-makers from the past all over the world and throughout time who used repetitive motifs to decorate handmade utilitarian objects.” [quoted in The Decorative Impulse, The Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1979]
Among her honors are: The Skowhegan Award; honorary doctorates from the College of Wooster, Ohio, and the California College of Arts and Crafts; and the Honors Award from the Women's Caucus for Art.
Early one-person exhibitions of Schapiro's work include: the Lyman Allen Museum, New London, Connecticut in 1966); The Shrine, The Computer and the Dollhouse at Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California at San Diego, Mills College in Oakland, California, and the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, 1975-1976; Femmages at Oberlin College, Ohio, 1977; shows at the College of Wooster Museum, Ohio (1980), Kent State University, Ohio (1983), I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can at Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina, 1986 and an exhibition at the Phyllis Rothman Gallery, Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1990.
Major Exhibitions
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1963. 1967, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1976, 1977 (Anatomy of a Kimono / Apron and Handkerchief Series)
Pattern Painting, P.S. 1 Art Center, Long Island City, NY, 1977
Patterning Painting, Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium, 1978
The Decorative Impulse, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Philadelphia, PA, 1979
Miriam Schapiro, A Retrospective: 1953-1980, College of Wooster Art Museum, OH; Wright State University Art Galleries, Dayton, OH; Kalamazoo Institute
of Fine Arts, MI; Vassar College Gallery, Poughkeepsie, NY; Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, IN; Spencer Museum, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS; Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; Visual Arts Gallery, Florida International University, Miami, FL; Loch Haven Art Center, Miami, FL, 1980- 1983
Miriam Schapiro: A Woman’s Way, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1997
Pattern and Decoration, An Ideal Vision in American Art, 1975 - 1985, Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 2008
Miriam Schapiro, A Visionary, National Academy of Design, 2016
Surface/Depth: The Decorative after Miriam Schapiro, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, 2018
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, 2020 and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2021