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A celebration of women's art
Miriam Schapiro, on exhibit at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, paid homage to the female art tradition long before it made it into textbooks.
By BRANDY STARK
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 12, 2001
Miriam Schapiro was a rising artist during a time when art by women was rarely studied and even less often shown.
As she struggled to balance her growing art career with raising her family, Schapiro experimented with new techniques during a highly innovative period in the art world. In the course of her 50-year career, Schapiro, who at age 77 is still painting, has become one of the most influential modernistic artists.
The Gulf Coast Museum of Art is featuring "Miriam Schapiro: Works on Paper; A Thirty Year Retrospective," an assortment of Schapiro's approaches to art on paper, including lithographs, fabric collages, and pen and ink drawings.
"I hope, essentially, that every visitor who comes to see our show gains an appreciation for the major contribution that Schapiro made to modern art," said Ken Rollins, executive director of the museum. "She has given women in art a role model, herself, as she has transformed in the past 30 years."
Schapiro was born in Toronto in 1923. She studied art at, among other places, colleges in New York and Iowa. In 1946, she married artist Paul Brach, working a series of odd jobs until she began focusing on her art full time in 1955, the same year her first child was born. Her debut, in 1957, was at the New Talent Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. At this time, she also hired her first art dealer, Andre Emmerich, who later dropped her because her art was deemed too controversial.
Many of her early works were large abstract paintings. She made no preparatory sketches and no post-painting notations. She worked with innovative gestural abstractions, later adding geometric designs to her works.
These designs led her to create her Shrines series during the early 1960s. Shrine: Homage to Lithography and Shrine: Homage to Cezanne, both lithographs, contain images found in many of her Shrines: her famed egg forms, abstract images and simple domestic scenes that display her early attempt to insert feminine forms into art.
Schapiro's commitment to feminism grew during the 1960s and '70s, blossoming into her own personal art style. She began to combine domestic elements, such as lace, fabric scraps, buttons, sequins and tea towels to create sophisticated compositions she called "femmages."
One such femmage is her acrylic and fabric work Patience, featuring an actual apron in its composition. With this piece, and others like it, Schapiro strives to honor women of the past by elevating traditional crafts into the world of fine art.
Schapiro also worked on several pieces that dealt with contemporary female artists. Both Homage and Re: Art History are tributes to artists such as Emily Carr, Georgia O'Keeffe and Sonia Delaunay. She also depicted male artists who had a significant influence on her own art career, as seen in Picasso and Me, 1979.
Many of Schapiro's works in the 1980s focused on quilts and quilting, a major traditional art for women as a social outlet and group collaborative. Invitation, a fabric, acrylic and paper work, continues the theme. Its general shape is based on the square pattern of a tabletop. Stenciled teacups, teapots, houses, doilies and pieces of floral fabric create the image, and a multicolored patchwork of fabric unites the work by balancing geometric symmetry with free-flowing images.
Her work with fabric evolved in the 1990s into a study of religions and heritage through a variety of costumes and costumed figures. Elaborate images stand dressed in outrageous outfits. Though the outfits are composed of diverse patterns, they create a sense of unity on the bodies they clothe.
Schapiro, in many ways, has become one of the artists she so zealously honored. Even as she continues to produce art, she has seen the transition from the complete dismissal of female artists from history to joining the women who now figure prominently in art history textbooks.
PREVIEW
"Miriam Schapiro: Works on Paper; A Thirty Year Retrospective" continues through May 13 at Gulf Coast Museum of Art, 12211 Walsingham Road, Largo. Admission: $3 adults; $2 seniors and students; free for members and children under 12; free to all on Thursdays. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday; noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Call (727) 518-6833.
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