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Student Union Collection |
Miriam
Schapiro
American, born 1925
What
is Paradise, 1980
acrylic and collage on paper
50” x 60”
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Miriam Schapiro has evolved from
the grand gesture of Action Painting in the 1950s to a hard-edge
geometric art in the 1960s to the political stance and stridency
of Feminist Art with Judy Chicago in the 1970s, to arrive, finally,
at her own feminine voice of decorative art and pattern painting
as represented in the Wake Forest work, What is Paradise.
A generation older than Judy Chicago and most of
the feminist artists, Schapiro nonetheless became an active feminist when she
and her husband, painter Paul
Brach, moved from New York to California. She joined with Chicago to start the
Feminist Art Project and the Womanhouse Environment in Los Angeles. Her art changed
radically too. She came to appreciate the kinds of craftwork women had done in
the past. She developed a method of collage, assemblage, and painting that used
historical materials pertaining
to women’s lives and traditionally female skills, such as embroidery and
quilting, which she called “femmages.”
With its applied fabric, stippled stitch-like use
of paint, and decorative floral
subject, What is Paradise is a good example of Schapiro’s femmage.
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