Miriam Schapiro passed away June 20th, 2015.
Click here for more information (Miriam Schapiro remembered).
Born: 1923, Toronto, Canada
Died: 2015, Hampton Bays, New York at age 91.

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

Miriam Schapiro
1999                                          (PRINTS)

"A decade of personal and political struggle with feminist issues crystallized in her pioneering and collaborative 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 which would allow them to project all their dreams and fantasies by creating an exclusively female environment in an old house. After renovating the 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 Schapiro has been giving the history of women's 'covert' art a brightly lit showcase. The once-tabooed scraps; sequins, 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)
I would like to personally thank the many wonderful students I have had the pleasure of printing with on this project, Jason Clark, Ryan Lindburg, and my colleague Elizabeth Dove, it is only with their strong enthusiasm and commitment that has made all this possible.
-James Bailey, Director, Matrix Press, The University of Montana-Missoula