The Miriam Schapiro Papers

Miriam Schapiro was born on November 15, 1923. She died on June 20, 2015. She was an artist, a feminist, an educator, and a collector of women's cultural artifacts.

Early Life

Miriam Schapiro's parents were Jewish Russian immigrants, who arrived separately to the United States sometime before the Russian Revolution. Her father was Theodore (Theo) Schapiro and her mother was Fannie Cohen. Schapiro's paternal grandfather was a rabbi in Russia, and later a tailor in Brooklyn. Schapiro's maternal grandfather was a town miller in a small Russian town. The Cohen family immigrated to the United States because of the discrimination they experienced being Jewish. Miriam Schapiro was born in 1923 in Toronto. Her mother stayed with family for the first year of Miriam's life while Theo studied art at the Art Students League, Cooper Union, and the Beaux Arts Ecole. When Schapiro was 1 year old, she and her mother returned to their Brooklyn apartment. Schapiro was trained to be an artist by her father. When Miriam was 15 years old, her father took her to a nude model art class funded by the Works Progress Administration at Erasmus Hall High School. Also in her teens, Schapiro took an art class at the Museum of Modern Art with Victor D'Amico which opened her artistic world to modernism and modern dance classes with the Rhom [sp?] sisters who came from the Bauhaus.

University Life

Miriam Schapiro began her college education at Hunter College of the City University of New York. In her junior year she transferred to the University of Iowa. She completed her undergraduate studies as well as two Master's degrees at University of Iowa. Mauricio Lasanky, the printmaking professor, was a significant influence on Schapiro's formative college years. Schapiro worked for him as his assistant. He taught her how to be professional and how to use the masters' work to inform your contemporary work. With students, Lasanky formed a professional student print club called the Iowa Print Club of which Schapiro was a member. The print club successfully organized an exhibit of their work at the Walker Art Center.

In 1946, Miriam Schapiro met Paul Brach in art school. That same year they were married. Schapiro credited their love of art for their 60-year marriage. Upon graduation in 1949, Paul applied to teaching jobs. He was offered a position at the University of Missouri to teach painting. Schapiro did not apply to jobs, and during their time in Missouri she was very unhappy. After this, Paul made certain to solidify a position for her before accepting appointments.

1950s/1960s

After Missouri, Schapiro and Brach moved back to New York City, around 1951. Phillip Guston, an artist who taught at the University of Iowa, nominated Paul Brach for membership in The Club. The Club was a group of Abstract Expressionist painters who met on Fridays for panel discussions and lectures, followed by dancing and drinking. Members and speakers included Willem deKooning, Harold Rosenburg, and Barnett Newman. Schapiro was never nominated for membership. As she recalled later in her life, women were there "to dance with and get with," certainly not as "serious" artists. In 1958 Schapiro began to be represented by the André Emmerich Gallery. Their relationship would continue until 1976. After Emmerich, Schapiro would be represented by Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Kristen Frederickson Gallery, and Eric Firestone Gallery. In 1964 Schapiro and Brach received artist fellowships to make prints at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.

In 1955 Paul and Miriam's son Peter was born. It was during this time that painting became extremely difficult for Schapiro. In the art history books that she read, there were no women artists represented. The women artists she knew in real life were wives of artists who sacrificed their careers for their families. Schapiro found that she felt guilt after having Peter when she would leave him to paint, and was afraid of failing. There was a distance between what Schapiro experienced in her life as a woman artist, and what she depicted on the canvas.

The California Years

In 1967 Miriam Schapiro and Paul Brach moved to La Jolla, California after Brach was offered a job at University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Miriam was also invited to lecture. During this time, she collaborated with Jack Mance and David Nalibof to create her computer drawings and paintings. She is one of the first artists to use computers to make art. Falling Ox is an iconic example of Schapiro's computer art.

In 1970, Miriam was given a lecturing job at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Around this time, Schapiro joined a consciousness raising session. Groups of women formed consciousness raising sessions to speak to each other about given topics like rape, harassment, emotional labor, and social roles. Influenced by Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Schapiro began to think about how gender influenced her life and art. Sometime between 1969 and 1970, Miriam Schapiro visited Judy Chicago's Feminist Art Program at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) in the Spring of 1971. This was the first time Schapiro was asked to speak about her own artwork to a group of people. The two, although 15 years apart in age, found in each other inspiration and a common mind set. Schapiro was intensely interested in the application of feminist pedagogy as a way to circumvent the typical art school trope of Artist as God and as a greenhouse to help women artists overcome sexism.

In the fall of 1971, the Feminist Art Program (FAP) was founded at CalArts by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Due to a late start to the first semester, Chicago, Schapiro, and some of the students met in each other's apartments and living rooms in order to hold consciousness raising sessions. Paula Harper, the FAP art historian, suggested that the students create an exhibition of artwork in another space, like a house. Womanhouse used performance and installation art to critique women's roles and to imagine a fantastical use of space in the house without the pressures of functionality. Schapiro worked with her friend Sherry Brody to create The Dollhouse , which was an entirely new way of thinking about art for Schapiro. Previously, her art had been monumental, somewhat neutral, and revealed her interest in formal problems. The Dollhouse was miniature, completely decorative, and filled with recognizable, personal symbolism. In 1973 Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven, and Sheila de Bretteville left CalArts to found the Women's Building. Miriam Schapiro continued the FAP until 1975.

Miriam began to be invited to speak about the Feminist Art Program, her art, and women artists in history by universities and women's groups. In 1976, Miriam travelled to Kansas City to give a lecture on women art makers (untrained women artists). During her stay, she looked through a Goodwill store for fabric where she found a tablecloth with embroidered women's names on them. Miriam cut the tablecloth and included it in her artwork Water Is Taught by Thirst. Since 1972 Schapiro had been producing "femmages," but it was in this moment that she narratively connected her interest in women's art to her own art making strategies. Schapiro used fabric in her artwork and collected examples of women's art: aprons, doilies, crocheted items, and embroidery. In 1976 Schapiro co-authored an article featured in Heresies magazine with Melissa Meyer titled "Waste Not Want Not," where they laid out the tenets of femmage and an historical acknowledgement of women as artists. One of Schapiro's most iconic femmages was the Anonymous Was a Woman suite of prints in which she used actual women's art to make impressions on the printing plates.

Feminist Organizations

In 1976, after moving back to New York City with her family, Schapiro became one of the founding members of two major feminist organizations: Heresies Collective and the New York Feminist Art Institute.

Heresies Collective Inc., was founded by Patsy Beckert, Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Harmony Hammond, Elizabeth Hess, Joyce Kozloff, Arlene Ladden, Lucy Lippard, Mary Miss, Marty Pottenger, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Pat Steir, May Stevens, Susana Torre, Elizabeth Weatherford, Sally Webster, and Nina Yankowitz in 1976. The collective published journals "devoted to the examination of art and politics from a feminist perspective" (Heresies Issue 1, 1977). Each issue focused on a specific theme like women's traditional arts, racism, and architecture. Heresies Collective published 27 issues between 1977 and 1993.

New York Feminist Art Institute (NYFAI), which began as a conversation about feminist pedagogy on the East Coast, was founded in 1979 by a small collective of women artists: Nancy Azara, Lucille Lessane, Irene Peslikis, Miriam Schapiro, Carol Stronghilos, and Selena Whitefeather. The Institute opened its classroom doors on July 9, 1979 with the ambitious vision of giving students both an increasing self-awareness and the skills necessary for the visual translation of a personal point of view shaped by historical and political consciousness (Katie Cercone, http://www.nyfai.org/articlesfile/nparadoxaarticle/Articlesnparadoxa1.html). NYFAI was open to students from 1979 through 1990 and also housed the Lucy Lippard Women's Art Registry. The archival collections of both organizations are held at Rutgers University.

1980s through the 2000s

In 1980, Schapiro had her first solo retrospective at the College at Wooster. In 1987 Miriam Schapiro received a Guggenheim Fellowship in order to continue creating works on dance and theater. Between 1983 and 1995 she received 5 honorary doctorates.

In the 1980s, Schapiro began her black paintings. With a black background, Schapiro added fabric, glitter, and glitter paint to create dynamic and beautiful surfaces. Additionally, in the 1980s, Schapiro started shaping her canvases to be extraordinarily large hearts. Like a valentine, or a greeting card, Schapiro's love of the decorative, the frivolous, and the feminine shone brightly. In the early 1990s, Schapiro's work focused on two main themes: Collaborations and Frida Kahlo. In works like Agony in the Garden and Mother Russia, Schapiro used her research about women artists to mimic their styles, their patterns, and their form. In a way, she was visualizing the kinship that she never experienced with women artists. Between 1999 and 2004, Miriam Schapiro was the subject of 4 retrospectives: Miriam Schapiro: A Retrospective of Paintings; Miriam Schapiro: Works on Paper; Miriam Schapiro's Art: A Journey; and Anarchy and Form: The Art of Miriam Schapiro. In 1995 the book The Power of Feminist Art became the first retrospective of the 1970s feminist art movement. Edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, it included essays on Womanhouse, the Feminist Art Program, and an interview with Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago. The book defined Miriam Schapiro as a founding mother of feminist art.

In 1999, Schapiro and Brach moved from their New York apartment to live full time at their East Hampton house which they had purchased in 1955. After leaving the Bernice Steinbaum gallery in 2000, Schapiro was represented by Kristen Fredrickson. She was also included in several large survey exhibitions that sought to re-evaluate 1970s feminist art including: Divisions of Labor, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, and Claiming Space. Schapiro continued to work and lecture until 2008, when her health started failing. Miriam Schapiro died on June 20, 2015.