Miriam Schapiro

(American/Canadian, 1923–2015)

Miriam Schapiro was an American-Canadian artist known for her vibrant, geometric quilts and her minimalistic abstract paintings. Her work often tackled feminist issues through tradition crafts, work which was historically associated with women and often devalued by the art world. In her fan shaped quilt Anatomy of a Kimono (1976), the artist assembled pieces of Japanese Kimonos through ornate needlework—elevating “woman’s work” to the status of high-art. Born on November 15, 1923 in Toronto, Canada, the artist soon moved to New York after her father was admitted to the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. She went on to study art under Paul Brach, who later became her husband, at the State University of Iowa. After working alongside Abstract Expressionists in New York, she founded the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts with Judy Chicago, dedicated to fostering the careers of female artists. In 1972, the two artists collaborated with a number of other prominent female artists in the groundbreaking installation project Womanhouse, where Schapiro first exhibited her sculpture Dollhouse. From the 1970s on, she began producing collages created from colorful fabrics, which she called “femmages,” which combined skills used by the Old Masters with historically female crafts. In her later work, the artist explored her Jewish heritage, and often painted images of empowered Jewish women, as seen in Mother Russia (1994) and My History (1997). Schapiro died in June 20, 2015 in Hampton Bays, NY. Today, her work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.