WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution Published in 2007 by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Pg
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WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution Published in 2007 by The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Pg. 293–294 Miriam Schapiro Miriam Schapiro is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and self-described “femmagist” whose work has been central to both feminist art and the Pattern and Decoration movement. Born in Canada, she went on to receive her bachelor’s degree from the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa) in Iowa City in 1945, her master’s degree in 1946, and her master’s in fine arts in 1949. In Iowa, she met Paul Brach, a fellow art student whom she married. In 1951, the couple moved to New York City, where they associated with many of the Abstract Expressionists; Schapiro became friends with many women artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Jane Wilson.1 Many early paintings of the 1950s are based on black-and-white reproductions of Old Master paintings or photographs of movie stars, with the figures veiled in abstract brushwork. In 1958–59, she temporarily lost her ability to work, a crisis precipitated by her struggle to create her identity as an artist in a male-dominated milieu that defined her primarily as a wife and mother. She ultimately started working again, and in 1960 produced a new series of paintings combining geometric structures with gestural brushwork. This led to her Shrines series of the early 1960s, in which each painting features a tower-like shrine with four deeply mitred compartments, each containing an image symbolizing the “creative woman artist.”2 In 1966, she read and became strongly influenced by Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook (1962), which focuses on a female writer struggling to unify her multiple roles as artist, mother, and activist into a coherent identity. In the mid-1960s, Schapiro’s growing interest in geometrical form came to the fore in a group of brightly colored, hard-edge paintings that are completely abstract. In 1967, Schapiro moved to Southern California and began her OX series of paintings and drawings. Each of these works features an iconic three-dimensional shape formed by the letter “O” superimposed over the letter “X.” OX (1967), Big OX (1968), and Big OX No.2 (1968) present head-on views of the shapes, while Side OX (1968) and Fallen OX (1969-70) present other perspectives. She produced some of the works in the series in collaboration with the physicist David Nalibof, who developed computer programs that altered her drawings of the shapes from various 1 Miriam Schapiro, quoted in Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life, exh. Cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams; and Lakeland, Florida: Polk Museum of Art, 1999), 35. 2 Ibid., 56. perspectives. In 1968, she declared that her intention was to invent a shape whose arms would draw viewers into the painting like a vista that draws one into a California landscape: “This form was constructed of both metallic silver paint and sensuous color. A combination of the ‘California of things glittering and gleaming and being very clean, pure, and rather special…with this refracting light, this inspiring light and sensual colors, flesh colors, colors that would draw you in.”3 In 1973, art historian Linda Nochlin suggested that OX might have another meaning: “The literal power of the splayed word-image formed by the interpenetrating letters “O” and “X,” heightened by enormous scale and vivid opposition of bright red-orange figures against a silver background, is countered by the tender pink recessive planes of the inner lining of the central image. Here, the pathos and mystery of the hole, with its implications of hidden depths and organic vulnerability, are tellingly played against the cool authority of the contemporary central image grounded in the literalness of the surface.”4 In 1974, Schapiro herself–who by this time had become a key figure in the women’s art movement–clarified its content by asserting that OX is a “cunt painting” that demonstrates that a woman can hold “strong, male-assertive, logical, measured, and reasonable thoughts in a female body.”5 In this respect, the OX series represents Schapiro’s efforts to invest the tradition of 1960s hard-edge abstraction with a feminist content that would remain private until it was acknowledged publicly, as Thalia Gouma-Peterson explained, “since the symbols for feminine otherness as seen by a woman do not exist in patriarchal culture.”6 In 1970, Schapiro was awarded a professorship at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, where her husband was also appointed dean; one year later, she and Judy Chicago established the groundbreaking Feminist Art Program at CalArts. The first project undertaken by the program was Womanhouse (1971-72), a collaborative effort in which twenty-three women transformed an abandoned mansion in Los Angeles by creating rooms that addressed women’s experiences. Schapiro and Sherry Brody contributed Dollhouse (1972), a miniature house that included both a nursery and an artist’s studio on the third floor, which, along with the entire Womanhouse project, “made possible [Schapiro’s] artistic reentry into the home and into women’s experience as a source of art.”7 At about the same time, Schapiro produced her first “femmages,” in which she combined fabric and paint into what Gouma-Peterson has described as “a new kind of collage with a specific meaning for and about women.”8 Known for her longstanding engagement with the history of women’s work in America and the global production of textile, as well as her use of personal and vernacular references, Schapiro stands as one of the key figures of American feminism. 3 Thomas H. Garver, Paul Brach and Miriam Schapiro: Paintings and Graphic Works, exh. Cat. (Balboa, California: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1969). In a footnote, Garver stated that quotes from Schapiro in his essay were from an interview conducted with the artist in October 1968. 4 Linda Nochlin “Miriam Schapiro: Recent Work,” Arts Magazine (November 1973), reprinted in Miriam Schapiro, 9-10. 5 Schapiro, in Miriam Schapiro, 64. 6 Miriam Schapiro, 65. 7 Ibid., 15. 8 Ibid. .