Miriam Schapiro
November 15, 1923 — June 20, 2015
Miriam Schapiro was a Canadian-American painter and art educator who was a central figure in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, who co-founded the pioneering Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts, co-created the influential Womanhouse installation, and who helped launch the Pattern and Decoration movement through her innovative "femmage" technique.
From Abstract Expressionism to Feminist Art
Born on November 15, 1923 in Toronto, Canada, Schapiro grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and showed early artistic talent. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1951 and began her career as an abstract expressionist painter at a time when the New York art world was deeply and explicitly male-dominated — the famous photograph of the "Irascible 18" leading abstract expressionists featured only men. Schapiro made significant work in abstract expressionism and then in computer-assisted art in the 1960s, establishing herself before the feminist turn that would define her legacy. In 1970, she moved to California and joined Judy Chicago in founding the Feminist Art Program at CalArts — the first program of its kind in an American art school, designed to create space for women artists and engage with female experience as legitimate subject matter for serious art.
Womanhouse and Femmage
In 1972, Schapiro and Chicago transformed a condemned Hollywood mansion into "Womanhouse," a collaborative installation that featured rooms created by women artists exploring themes of domesticity, femininity, and female experience. The project became one of the most important early events in feminist art history, drawing thousands of visitors and generating enormous critical discussion. Schapiro then developed her signature "femmage" technique — a word she coined — which combined painting with fabrics, lace, needlework, and other materials historically associated with women's domestic labor and craft. By incorporating these materials into large-scale fine art canvases, she challenged the boundary between "high art" and "craft," arguing that the denigration of needlework and quilting as mere craft was itself a gender-based judgment. Her femmage works became central to the Pattern and Decoration movement of the late 1970s, which pushed back against the severity of minimalism.
Did You Know?
Schapiro's "Doll House" (1972), a miniature house installation in which each room was designed by a different woman artist, was a conceptual tour de force that used the very objects and spaces associated with female domesticity as a vehicle for feminist critique. The choice of the dollhouse — a toy that rehearses traditional female domestic roles for girls — as the form for feminist artistic commentary was pointed and perfectly calibrated, and the work is now considered a canonical piece of early feminist conceptual art.
Legacy
Miriam Schapiro died on June 20, 2015 in Hampton Bays, New York, at the age of 91. Her work is held in major museum collections including the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Pattern and Decoration movement she helped launch is now recognized as an important chapter in post-minimalist art history, and her foundational role in creating institutional spaces for women artists — through the Feminist Art Program and through her advocacy — helped transform the conditions under which women artists work. She is one of the indispensable figures of second-wave feminist art practice.