Thanks to Miriam Schapiro and Other Women Artists

By Tracy Ellyn

Tracy Ellyn is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning artist who lives in Miami, Florida. She works in layers of 19th, 20th and 21st century techniques, often all within one piece.  We are delighted to present this article as part of a series devoted to women artists.

Miriam Schapiro, Anonymous was a Woman, 1976. Acrylic and collage on paper, 30″ x 22″. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Amy Wolf and John Hatfield in memory of Cynthia Africano, 2005.61. © artist or artist’s estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2005.61_PS1.jpg). Fair Use.

In the past few years, Art Basel, museum shows, and other important exhibitions have demonstrated a strong use of textiles, shifting them from the realm of women’s craft to non-gender-specific fine art of the highest caliber. Let’s visit some of these 21st century artists. But first, let’s look back to an earlier start, and revisit the work of Miriam Schapiro.

Miriam Schapiro, 1923-2015, was both an artist and an activist who helped spearhead the feminist art movement in the 1970s. Her own art was visually stunning, filled with color and pattern that spoke of the political ideology of women’s liberation. What aesthetic principal would be a visual equivalent of feminism? Textiles. collages, quilts, lace, clothing, needlepoint, applique, weaving and more, sometimes all on one canvas and often mixed with paint. After all, before this, Schapiro was a hard-edge painter.

Art critics initially had a hard time with her work, likely because they were all men. These textile works, which Schapiro called “femmage,” were nothing more than craft, the critics said. They were not yet able to bring content into what Schapiro intentionally used from hundreds of years of craft form.

The titles she gave her work, such as “Anonymous Was a Woman,” shown above, spoke volumes about our need to transform women’s obscure lives.

Miriam Schapiro. Agony in the Garden, 1991. Acrylic on canvas with glitter, 90 3/16″ x 72 3/16″ x 2″. Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Harry Kahn, 1991.112. © artist or artist’s estate. Fair Use.

“Agony in the Garden”, shown above, accomplishes the same purpose. While the workmanship was exquisite, as were the pieces as a whole, Schapiro’s goal was to challenge the definition of “high art,” made known by predominantly male artists, versus “decorative art” or “craft,” relegating women and folk artists to anonymity. Stylistically this painting mimics the look of a collage and reflects Schapiro’s belief that decorative elements and women’s work are feasible artistic means to express female experience, while giving a voice to both political and provocative realities.

Schapiro created “Agony in the Garden” as part of her “Collaboration” series that she began in the mid-1970s. In this series she dialogues with and pays homage to famous women artists. For  “Agony in the Garden” she chose Frida Kahlo, whose self-portrait “The Broken Column”, 1944, is reproduced in the center of the work.

By the 1980s, emerging from her “femmage” canvases were dancing women, combining fabric with expressive use of paint on canvas. They were exuberant and breaking free from a male-dominated world, depicted by men on canvases from whom women were running. These post-femmage works still had those great titles that dripped with double entendre, such as, “I’m Dancin’ As Fast As I Can”.

Now, 21st century ideals of freedom, women’s rights, and a non-gender-specific world, allow us to perceive such textile-driven work as fine art instantly. Sheila Hicks, born in 1938 is an American artist who lives and works in Paris, France. She is an expert weaver, now pushes her fibers forward into 3-dimensional space, wanting to satisfy the viewer’s desire to touch and hold it. Her work, “Seance,” at Art Basel, a bundled, large-scale, site-specific work, redefines textiles completely.

Nick Cave, born in 1959, is an American fabric sculptor, dancer, and performance artist. He uses what would have formerly been called a woman’s craft to create skins, or “soundsuits,” that he sees himself covered in as a way we all cover ourselves in public. Cave was raised by a single mother and had to find a way to make hand-me-downs, thus becoming a textile artist. His sculptural pieces are elaborate, always sewn, containing mixes of feathers, doilies, handbags, Haitian voodoo flags, African ceremonial costumes, and so much more. Some of his soundsuits are playful, some are political, and nobody says this is something a woman would make. Times have certainly changed.

Other 21st century artist who have pushed the textile concept higher into the fine art genre are Judith Scott, Toshiko Horiuchi-Macadam, Gabriel Dawe, and so many more. Their predecessors to thank along with Miriam Schapiro are Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, Boetti, and many more going far back in history, from the anonymous women who helped Peter Paul Rubens create his room-sized tapestries of his paintings, to even further back to ancient times, when anonymous women created various cultural masterpieces.

Learn about Manhattan Arts International “HerStory” exhibitions