Miriam Schapiro, Cabinet, 1999

Miriam Schapiro

Cabinet, 1999

Fabric, Rickrack, photography, magazine images, greeting cards, lithography, collage, text

Hand Signed and dated by the artist on the lower right front

Unique work. Miriam Schapiro, burst onto the international art scene as the only woman featured, along with her male colleagues Frank Stella, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Barnet Newman, Ray Parker and others in the groundbreaking 1964 Jewish Museum exhibition "Towards a New Abstraction" curated by Alan Solomon. Schapiro is the founder of the Pattern & Decoration Movement, and is being re-discovered by a new generation of collectors. Her 2018 retrospective at the Museum of Art and design, followed by other international museum and gallery exhibitions received major critical acclaim. Today her works continue to smash records at auction and retail sales are robust. She is represented by the prestigious Eric Firestone Gallery in New York. The present work - Cabinet - is a quintessential example of the style of "Femmage" that Schapiro, along with artist Melissa Meyer, pioneered. Femmage, or feminist collage, was defined by Schapiro and Meyer as an activity “practiced by women using traditional women's techniques to achieve their art—sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing - and repurposing it into high art, making the statement that women's work matters. Elissa Auther, who curated the Miriam Schapiro retrospective for the Museum of Design, described her style as follows:
"...Behind this exchange is the story of Schapiro’s radical transformation of her painting practice in the early 1970s, ignited by the women’s movement. Shortly before this time, Schapiro had produced a body of work in the dominant language of hard-edged, geometric abstraction, and her political conversion to feminism led her to view these works as nascent attempts to come to terms with herself as both a woman and an artist. Eventually, her newfound feminist identity effected a dramatic shift in her practice, away from this prevailing style to the enthusiastic elevation of craft and decorative traditions, especially those associated with women’s culture and domestic labor. She called this new form femmage (fig. 1), a neologism that combined feminine and collage, reflecting the tighter, hard-won alignment of her practice as an artist with her politics as a feminist..."
The present work features all of the elements of "femmage" in a very intimate way - including a Cabinet full of meaningful personal mementos such as a collage with a message addressed to "Mimi and Paul" (Miriam and her husband Paul Brach) from Tom (Schapiro's assistant at the time, so it's a bit of an inside secret, as she allowed him to "sign" his name on the work), and other pieces of sentimental family memorabilia that women would typically keep in a "cabinet". Here, the personal becomes universal.

In 2019 alone, works by Miriam Schapiro were featured in the following exhibitions:
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts
Less is A Bore: Maximalist Art & Design
June 26 - September 22, 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972 - 1985
October 27, 2019 - May 11, 2020
Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany
Where Art Might Happen: The Early Years of CalArts
August 30 - November 11, 2019

Measurements:
Frame:
34 x 27.5 x 1.5 inches
Artwork:
30 x 23.5 inches