Sunday in the Art Room SITAR 7/12/26

  Welcome to

SITAR is about ANYTHING art. Your art, someone else's art, writing, photography, the art of cooking, the art of sewing and textiles. Sharing historical art, street art, a story about art. Do you have a question or need help with art? Write a blog post and link it up here. We will all try to help with it. My only rule is that if someone asks for critique it must be done with generosity and consideration. 

This is a place of learning, encouragement and inspiration.

 

 I'm writing this on Saturday.

 

I had a good day today. Very early this AM I had an hour and a half MRI. From brain to lumbar. I had the best tech taking care of me. I will have the results tomorrow.

After that Mr. M. and I went to the store for a few things and I didn't get tired at all. I can feel the flare letting up. Hurrraaayyy

 

But on with SITAR.

Today I want to tell you about an artists that I have admired for a very long time. 

Miriam Schapiro.

Schariro was born November 15, 1923.

She is widely known as a pioneer of the Women’s Art Movement and a leading force in American post-World War II art. Recognized for her colorful and sensuous abstractions of this period, Schapiro showed regularly at André Emmerich Gallery, where in 1958, she was the first woman to have a solo exhibition. Despite considerable success, she felt an outsider to the male-dominated Abstract Expressionism scene and her work of this period explores themes of feminine interiority.

She moved to California where she invented the term “femmage” to explain her process for creating art, in which she began to combine painting, textiles, and paper into collages.  

 

Miriam Schapiro Interview, 1959 oil on canvas,  

59 1/2h x 54w in

Ahead of her time.

In 1967, Schapiro moved to California where she became a lecturer at University of California San Diego. Here, she was exposed to a scientific community at the university and cool West Coast formalism. Inspired by her coastal, sun-soaked landscape, Schapiro transformed the bright colors, seascapes, and modern architecture of Southern California into monumental hard-edge paintings. Connecting with computer physicists, Schapiro commissioned a custom program that allowed her to transform her hand-drawn shapes through digital manipulation into new distortions, which she then painted.

For Women by Women

Womanhouse (January 30 – February 28, 1972)  Artists chose a dilapidated house in LA destined for demolition and took it over for the installation. Twenty-one women each chose one room to take over for her individual work. The feminist art installation and performance space was organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program, and was the first public exhibition of art centered upon female empowerment. Chicago, Schapiro, their students, and women artists from the local community, including Faith Wilding, participated.  Chicago and Schapiro encouraged their students to use consciousness-raising techniques to generate the content of the exhibition.  Together, the students and professors worked to build an environment where women's conventional social roles could be shown, exaggerated, and subverted.

Only women were allowed to view the exhibition on its first day, after which the exhibition was open to all viewers. During the exhibition's duration, it received approximately 10,000 visitors.

I would have loved to be part of this. 

 

Some of the artful rooms. This is actually a doll house. Miriam Schapiro and Sherry Brody, 1972, via Smithsonian American Art Museum

Nurturant Kitchen in Womanhouse by Susan Frazier, Vicki Hodgetts, and Robin Weltsch, 1972, via judychicago.com 

Miriam Schapiro, Mechano/Flower Fan, 1979; Acrylic and fabric collage on paper, 30 x 44 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of MaryRoss Taylor in honor of her mother, Betty S. Abbott; © 2023 Estate of Miriam Schapiro/Artists Rights Society, New York 

 

Miriam Shapiro. Beauty of Summer. Acrylic and fabric on canvas. 1973-74. Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, New York. 

 Miriam Schapiro fundamentally changed art for women by elevating domestic crafts such as quilting, lace maing, and embroidery to the status of high art. Operating in a male-dominated mid-century art world, she pioneered feminist art education, co-founded the first Feminist Art Program, and championed the visibility of women's history  

Miriam Schapiro passed away June 20, 2015

I hope you check out more about Mirium and all that she has done for women, not just in art. 
 Nicole 

Womanhouse 

eric firestone gallery

The Collector  

Artnet