Miriam Schapiro

[4] "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave Schapiro the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style.

The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".

Her Russian immigrant grandfather invented the first movable doll's eye in the United States[6] and manufactured "Teddy Bears.

She studied printmaking under Mauricio Lasansky and was his personal assistant, which then led her to help form the Iowa Print Group.

Miriam's Schapiro's successive studios, after this period of crisis, became both environments for and reflections of the changes in her life and art.

The Russian Avant Garde was an important moment in Modern Art history for Schapiro to reflect on because women were seen as equals.

[10] Although Brach frequented The Club where abstract expressionist artists met to debate, talk, drink, and dance, she was never a member.

[3] Beginning in 1960 Schapiro began to eliminate abstract expressionist brushwork from her paintings and in order to introduce a variety of geometric forms.

The play between the illusion of depth and the acceptance of the surface became the main formal strategy of Miriam's work for the rest of the decade.

One of Schapiro's biggest turning points in her art career was working at the workshop and experimenting with Josef Albers' Color-Aid paper, where she began making several new shrines and created her first collages.

This work is described as "a newly invented, body-based, archetypal emblem for female power and identity, realized in brilliant red-orange, silver, and 'tender shades of pink'".

The program set out to address problems in the arts from an institutional position and focused on the expansion of a female environment in downtown L.A.

In Womanhouse women were able to turn the creativity invested in providing their families with supportive environments toward themselves by allowing their fantasies to take over all rooms.

[3] They wanted the creation of art to be less of a private, introspective adventure and more of a shared public process through consciousness-raising sessions, personal confessions, and technical training.

In the early seventies, succeeding Schapiro's collaboration in Womanhouse, she made her first fabric collages in her studio in Los Angeles, which looked much like a room in a house.

[3] In her definition of femmage, Schapiro wrote that the style, which simultaneously recalls quilting and Cubism, has a "woman-life context" and that it "celebrates a private or public event."

[3] Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

This series combined reproductions of the work of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot with colorful and sensuous fabric borders in patterns inspired by quilts.

Her painting My History (1997) she used the same structure as the House project and built rooms of different memories surrounding her Jewish heritage.

Her most explicit Jewish-themed statement in art was Four Matriarchs, stained glass windows portraying the biblical heroines Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.

She added pieces from each artist work in her "collaborative" style to join them as revolutionary women and give hidden figures praise.

[30] In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.