Miriam Schapiro
Miriam Schapiro
1923 - 2015
American painter and collagist of Canadian birth. She studied at the State University of Iowa (1943–9), where she met and married the painter Paul Brach (1924–2007). In the 1950s she specialized in gestural abstractions and in the 1960s in hard-edge paintings. In the 1970s Schapiro developed a method of collage, assemblage and painting that used found or saved material relating to women’s lives and traditionally female skills such as embroidery and quilting, calling it ‘femmage’.
After meeting Judy Chicago, Schapiro co-founded and co-directed the Feminist Art Program with her at the California Institute of Arts (1971–5); she also participated with other feminist artists in the Womanhouse Environment, Los Angeles. During the 1970s she was a leader of the pattern and decorative movement. Her figurative work of the 1980s, such as I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (1984; New York, Bernice Steinbaum Gal.), features dancing bodies divided into large, flat, sharply-defined shapes, painted in bright acrylic or covered with colourful patterned fabric. [Ruth Bass. "Schapiro, Miriam." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T076406.]
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