Book Description

A pioneering force in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923) dared to challenge the marginalized role of women in the art world by creating a visual vocabulary to express women's experiences. In this lavishly illustrated book, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist, acclaimed art historian Thalia Gouma-Peterson traces the trajectory of Schapiro's career over five decades, from her gestural canvases of the 1950s, to her self-exploratory "Shrines" and geometric abstractions of the 1960s, to her large-scale femmages (feminist-oriented collages of paint and fabric) of the 1970s and 1980s, and finally to her autobiographical figural compositions of the 1980s and 1990s. The book opens with an insightful foreword by Linda Nochlin, who was among the first scholars to recognize and teach feminist art history. She reflects on a significant 1973 article she wrote about Schapiro, which is reprinted in the book in its entirety. Schapiro was a founder, with Judy Chicago, of the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s, out of which came the groundbreaking collaborative installation Womanhouse, a full-scale feminist environment created in an abandoned house in Hollywood. This project marked the beginning of Schapiro's legendary collaborations with other women, who gave her samplers, doilies, tea towels, quilt squares -- "handicrafts" associated with women's conventional homemaking role -- to incorporate into her femmages. With her monumental heart-, fan-, and house-shaped canvases layered with pieces of fabric and paint, which reclaim forms and symbols traditionally trivialized as sentimental, feminine, and decorative,Schapiro helped launch the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s and developed a colorful and sensuous style that has influenced a generation of younger artists. Then there are Schapiro's "collaborations" across time and space, in which she appropriates the work of her female predecessors -- such as Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, Sonia Delaunay, and Natalia Goncharova -- as a means to lay claim to a genealogy of women artists. Figural paintings on the themes of dance, performance, and masquerade are further explorations of self-identity in Schapiro's work. By piecing together fragments of her own autobiography with the experiences of other women to express a feminist vision, Schapiro, in the words of Gloria Steinem, has been "the rare woman who had a choice between acceptance and pioneering -- and who exercised it".