Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #839512 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

From Library Journal
Now in her seventies, Schapiro is one of the historic foremothers of the American feminist art movement. Yet, apart from Paula Bradley's dissertation, Miriam Schapiro (1983), this is the first work on the artist. The book, accompanying a Schapiro retrospective traveling around the country through 2001, includes 125 illustrations, 75 in full color. Research is based on the artist's notebooks and interviews by Gouma-Peterson, a longtime friend and art critic. Taking a psychoanalytic stance, Schapiro painted beautifully in Abstract Expressionism, then moved to several types of symbolic, geometric, computer-generated entities. The most characteristic works are her unique, highly patterned multimedia collage paintings of fabric and acrylic. From the 1980s on, Shapiro displays even more lushly conceived compositions, both figurative and postmodern. Very highly recommended for graduates and undergraduates, this belongs in all academic and larger public library collections.AMary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson Univ., MD
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher
A pioneering force in the feminist art movement of the 1970s, Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923) is an internationally renowned artist. In this, the only comprehensive work on Schapiro, feminist art historian Thalia Gouma-Peterson traces Schapiro's career from her early gestural canvases to her legendary collaborations with other women artists to her femmages (feminist-oriented collages) to her tributes to female artists of the past. Best known for her large heart- and fan-shaped canvases layered with fabric and paint, Schapiro helped launch the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and '80s and developed a richly decorative style that has influenced a generation of younger artists. Noted scholar Linda Nochlin contributes an insightful foreword, while Gouma-Peterson draws from Schapiro's writings to convey the artist's reflections on art, art history, and the feminist movement. 125 illustrations, 75 in full color, 9 x 11" Thalia Gouma-Peterson is professor of art history and museum director at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. She has curated numerous exhibitions and written for many art magazines. She is co-author of Abrams' Breaking the Rules: Audrey Flack: A Retrospective 1950-1990. Gouma-Peterson lives in Oberlin, Ohio. Linda Nochlin is the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Insti tute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a pioneering scholar of feminist art history. She has written a number of books and is a contributor to Abrams' The Power of Feminist Art. Exhibition Schedule Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida Dec. 11, 1999-Mar. 5, 2000 Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio Mar. 17-June 2, 2000

Customer Reviews

Beautiful book on a soulful and inventive artist
Miriam Schapiro, now in her seventies, has been making art since childhood. She grew up in New York City, the daughter of an artist father, a powerful intellectual who became her mentor, and a mother who was a dreamer, a bookworm, and a fabulous housekeeper. (Years later, the home arts reappear in some of Schapiro's ground-breaking feminist installations.) Striving to be an artist in a critically harsh and often socially difficult male-dominated art world (anecdotes abound), Schapiro created paintings, lithographs, and paper, paint, and fabric collages, and later, original and amazing installations and collaborative works. She was a teacher, too, and provided inspiration and community-building skills to countless students and women artists. Her awareness of women's lives informed much of her later work, and her observations are insightful and powerful. This book is generously illustrated, and provides a detailed biography as well as a picture of the various art scenes of this country, midcentury and beyond. Schapiro's recollections and journal entries, along with the author's careful and extensive research, form the source material. First-rate book on a terrific artist.