Miriam "Mimi" Schapiro (November 15, 1923 – June 20, 2015) was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Her artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. She incorporated craft elements into her paintings due to their association with women and femininity. She often used icons that are associated with women, such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns, and the color pink. In the 1970s, she made the hand fan, a typically small woman's object, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave her the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style. The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".
Schapiro was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the only child of Russian Jewish parents. Her Russian immigrant grandfather invented the first movable doll's eye in the United States and manufactured "Teddy Bears". Schapiro later included dolls in her work, as paper cutouts and as photo reproductions of images from magazines, and in her statement accompanying an exhibition of her work at the Flomenhaft Gallery, she remarked that "In our country we don't feel about dolls as Europeans, Africans or Asians do," providing an anecdote that nuns at a Japanese temple explained their reason for being there was to care for the souls of the dolls. Her father, Theodore Schapiro, was an artist and an intellectual who was studying at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, in New York, when Schapiro was born. He was an industrial design artist who fostered her desire to be an artist and served as her role model and mentor. Her mother, Fannie Cohen, a homemaker, encouraged Schapiro to take up a career in the arts. At age six, Schapiro began drawing.
As a teenager, Schapiro was taught by Victor d’Amico, her first modernist teacher at the Museum of Modern Art. In the evenings she joined WPA classes for adults to study drawing from the nude model. In 1943, Schapiro entered Hunter College in New York City, but eventually transferred to the University of Iowa. At the University of Iowa, Schapiro studied painting with Stuart Edie and James Lechay. She studied printmaking under Mauricio Lasansky and was his personal assistant, which then led her to help form the Iowa Print Group. Lasansky taught his students to use several different printing techniques in their work and to study the masters' work in order to find solutions to technical problems.
At the State University of Iowa she met the artist Paul Brach, whom she married in 1946. After Brach and Schapiro graduated in 1949, Brach received a job in the University of Missouri as a painting instructor. Schapiro did not receive a position, and was very unhappy during their time there. By 1951 they moved to New York City and befriended many of the Abstract expressionist artists of the New York School, including Joan Mitchell, Larry Rivers, Knox Martin and Michael Goldberg. Schapiro and Brach lived in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. Miriam and Paul had a son, Peter Brach, in 1955. Before and after the birth of her son Peter, Schapiro struggled with her identity and place as an artist. Miriam Schapiro's successive studios, after this period of crisis, became both environments for and reflections of the changes in her life and art.
She died on June 20, 2015, in Hampton Bays, New York, aged 91.
Miriam Schapiro's art career spanned over four decades. She was involved in Abstract expressionism, Minimalism, Computer art, and Feminist art. She worked with collage, printmaking, painting, femmage – using women's craft in her artwork, and sculpture. Schapiro not only honored the craft tradition in women's art, but also paid homage to women artists of the past. In the early 1970s she made paintings and collages which included photo reproductions of past artists such as Mary Cassatt. In the mid 1980s she painted portraits of Frida Kahlo on top of her old self-portrait paintings. In the 1990s Schapiro began to include women of the Russian Avant Garde in her work. The Russian Avant Garde was an important moment in Modern Art history for Schapiro to reflect on because women were seen as equals.
New York and Abstract Expressionism
Paul Brach and Miriam Schapiro moved back to New York after graduate school in the early 1950s. Although Brach frequented The Club where abstract expressionist artists met to debate, talk, drink, and dance, she was never a member. In one of her journals, she wrote that women were not viewed as serious artists by members of The Club. Schapiro worked in the style of Abstract expressionism during this time period. Between 1953 and 1957, Schapiro created a substantial body of work. She created her own gestural language: "painting thinly and wiping out", in which the wiped area played a significant role as the painted area. Although these works were abstracted such as her work Beast Land and Plenty, Schapiro based them off of black and white illustrations of works by the "old masters". In December 1957, André Emmerich selected one of her paintings for the opening of his gallery.
In 1960, she began to eliminate abstract expressionist brushwork from her paintings and in order to introduce a variety of geometric forms. Schapiro started looking for maternal symbols to unify her own roles as a woman. Her series, Shrines was created in 1961–63 with this in mind. It is one of her earliest groups of work that was also an autobiography. Each section of the work show an aspect of being a woman artist. They are also symbolic of her body and soul. The play between the illusion of depth and the acceptance of the surface became the main formal strategy of her work for the rest of the decade. The Shrines enabled Schapiro to discover the multiple and fragmented aspects of herself. In 1964, Schapiro and her husband Paul both worked at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. One of Schapiro's biggest turning points in her art career was working at the workshop and experimenting with Josef Albers' Color-Aid paper, where she began making several new shrines and created her first collages.
In 1967, Schapiro and Brach moved to California so both could teach in the art department at the University of California, San Diego. There, Schapiro met David Nalibof, a physicist who worked for General Dynamics. Nalibof formulated computer programs that could plot and alter her drawings. This was how one of her most iconic works, Big Ox #1 from 1968 was created. The diagonals of which represented the limbs of the "Vitruvian man", while the O depicted the center of the women, the vagina, the womb. This work is described as "a newly invented, body-based, archetypal emblem for female power and identity, realized in brilliant red-orange, silver, and 'tender shades of pink'". The O is also thought to symbolize the egg, which exists as the window into the maternal structure with outstretched limbs.
In 1971, Schapiro, with artist Judy Chicago, began to develop the Feminist Art Program at the newly established California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. The program set out to address problems in the arts from an institutional position and focused on the expansion of a female environment in downtown L.A. In Womanhouse women were able to turn the creativity invested in providing their families with supportive environments toward themselves by allowing their fantasies to take over all rooms. They wanted the creation of art to be less of a private, introspective adventure and more of a shared public process through consciousness-raising sessions, personal confessions, and technical training. "('House') became the repository of female fantasy and womanly dreams". Schapiro participated in the Womanhouse exhibition in 1972. Schapiro's smaller piece within Womanhouse, called "Dollhouse", was constructed using various scrap pieces to create all the furniture and accessories in the house. Each room signified a particular role a woman plays in society and depicted the conflicts between them.