Miriam Schapiro

Anonymous Was a Woman II Suite

Miriam Schapiro, "Anonymous Was a Woman II: Deer", Soft ground etching, 15"x 11", 1999

Miriam Schapiro, "Anonymous Was a Woman II: Oval", Soft ground etching, 15"x 11", 1999

Miriam Schapiro, "Anonymous Was a Woman II: Antimacasser", Soft ground etching, 15"x 11", 1999

Miriam Schapiro, "Anonymous Was a Woman II: Mimi's Baby Bonnet", Soft ground etching, 15"x 11", 1999

Anonymous Was a Woman III Suite

Miriam Schapiro, "Anonymous Was a Woman III: Launching Earhart", Soft ground etching, 17 1/2"x 22", 1999

Miriam Schapiro, "Anonymous Was a Woman III: Pineapple", Soft ground etching, 17 1/2"x 22", 1999

Miriam Schapiro, "Anonymous Was a Woman III: A Rose for Euclid", Soft ground etching, 17 1/2"x 22", 1999

Miriam Schapiro, "Anonymous Was a Woman III: Web", Soft ground etching, 17 1/2"x 22", 1999

"A decade of personal and political struggle with feminist issues crystallized in her pineering and colaborative involvement in Womanhouse. Co-directing the Feminist Art Program with Judy Chicago at the time (1970), they started off the school year by involving their students in a project wihich would allow them to project all their dreams and fantasises by creating an exclusively female enviroment in an old house. After renovating teh house, they transformed it with performance and art works which dealt with specifically feminist issues. They used this explorative process as a means of restructuring their identities as women artists in a patriarchal (art) world...

Since then, Miriam Shapiro has been giving the history of women's 'covert' art a brightly lit showcase. The once-tabooed scraps; seequins, buttons, threads, rickrack, spangles, yarn; silk, taffeta, cotton, burlap, and wool, were excavated from the musty attics and dredged from the dark closets of art history. Now, they are assembled and coordinated with emotional and creative thought into 'femmages.' Having taken embroidered upholstery out of the parlor, quilts off beds, clothing off hangers, scrapbooks out of trunks, and tapestries from beneath our feet, Schapiro reeducates us about a history of buried art, women's art." (P. 825, article by Elise LaRose)

Artist: Miriam Schapiro

Birth: 1923, Toronto, Canada

Education: State University of Iowa (B.A. 1945, M.A. 1946, M.F.A. 1949).

Residence: New York City/East Hampton.

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.

Major Awards: Tamarind Fellowship, 1963; Ford Foundation Grant, 1964; National Endowment of the Arts, 1976 and 1985; Yaddo Felllowship, 1981.

Gallery Affiliations: Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York.

Museum Collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Hirschorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Santa Barbara Art Museum.

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

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