TEACHING FILES,, 1946-1994

Summary: Contains documentation of Miriam's teaching career from the early 1960s through the late 1970s, with documents from her visiting artist teaching from the 1980s and 1990s. Paul Brach began teaching right out of college around 1950. After the birth of their son, they were short of money and Schapiro started teaching at college level. When Brach would be invited to teach in the 1960s, he would attempt to arrange for Schapiro to be able to teach there as well, especially when they moved outside of New York. Schapiro and Brach moved from Iowa to Missouri to New York to California following teaching jobs from the late 1940s through the late 1970s. In the late 1970s, Brach and Schapiro both stopped teaching full time order to dedicate more time to the studio. After 1978, Miriam lectured as an invited artist and gave single semester classes. See LECTURES AND WRITINGS for further documentation of that aspect.

In 1967 Schapiro and Brach taught at University of California, San Diego. Paul eventually left to join the California Institute of the Arts as Dean of the Art Department, and Miriam followed in 1970. At Cal Arts Miriam felt freer to challenge pedagogical norms, partially influenced by Judy Chicago and partially through the neo-Bauhaus cultivated environment created by Cal Arts. In 1971 Schapiro visited Judy Chicago's Feminist Art Program (FAP) at Fresno State College. Judy Chicago had created a female environment for women to learn to be artists which Miriam felt an immediate connection to. The FAP was a greenhouse, a secluded and intense environment for women to train to be serious artists. Chicago and Schapiro both felt that women were not prepared to be artists in art school: that art school did not address challenges specific to being a woman artist. There were hardly any women artists written about in textbooks, there were hardly any female art professors, and female students often felt as if they had to create a certain kind of art to be taken seriously. The FAP used consciousness raising to break down gender norms, it encouraged any type of art making (other than mainstream minimalism), and students read and researched women artists and writers. The women of the FAP explored what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to be an artist, and what it meant to be a woman artist. This was often expressed through Cunt Art (art that resembled a vulva or had central core imagery a la Georgia O'Keeffe). Miriam Schapiro played a pivotal role in bringing the FAP to Cal Arts in the Fall of 1971. The FAP continued until 1976 under the guidance of Miriam Schapiro and Sherry Brody.

Document types in this series include broadsides, correspondence, newspaper clippings, lists, invitations, class lists, student essays, teaching notes, color theory examples, and some small publications. Most of the teaching files document the FAP at Cal Arts, although there are a few files on the Fresno FAP. The rest of files document Schapiro's early teaching. Cal Arts files contain general structure and development information.

Names of Correspondents in Anonymous Was a Woman: Eleanor Antin, Lynda Benglis, Grace Hartigan, Linda Nochlin, Agnes Martin, Arlene Raven/Judy Chicago, Betye Saar, Carolee Schneeman, Joan Snyder, and June Wayne.

Related Series: PHOTOGRAPHS that document the Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse. LECTURES AND WRITINGS detail Miriam's various lecture series after she stopped teaching in the late 1970s.