National Academy: February 4 to May 8, 2016
1083 Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
New York City,  (212) 369-4880

Firestone: February 4 to March 6, 2016
4 Great Jones Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street
New York City, (917) 324-3386

In 1972, the year that Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago were creating Womanhouse with their students at Cal Arts, my older cousin Annie taught me a game called Masculine/Feminine. Two players would alternate, pointing to an object and asking, “Masculine, or feminine?” Telephone, driveway, rec-room: masculine. Paint brush, river, rhinestone: feminine. This game was a lot of fun, but it was also strange, because, as a ten-year-old kid, I couldn’t understand why things would have a gender. Two concurrent exhibitions of the work of Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) in New York have me playing this game all over again. As I stand in front of her iconic Dollhouse (1972), on view at the National Academy Museum, I think about the broader impact of Schapiro’s legacy, as well as the new knowledge that we can acquire by focusing on a distinct period in the work of this luminary of feminist art.

Miriam Schapiro: The California Years, 1967-1975 inaugurates the Eric Firestone Loft at 4 Great Jones Street, a fourth-floor walk-up that is redolent with the histories of artists including Walter De Maria, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, who once had studios nearby. Firestone now handles the Schapiro estate, and his commitment to scholarly research is commendable. Installed within a long, whitewashed space flooded with winter light, this tightly curated exhibition provides a view onto a lesser-known body of Schapiro’s work, created during an eight-year period when the artist was living on the West Coast. The Firestone show establishes a connective thread from Schapiro’s Abstract Expressionist works, to the “shrines” of the early 1960s, to the geometric abstractions, to the femmage works that are on view uptown, in a concentrated if modest survey curated by Maura Reilly at the National Academy Museum.

By the time Schapiro arrived in California in 1967 with her husband, the painter Paul Brach, she was already a successful New York artist. She had attended meetings at the Eighth Street Club (where, like the other few women in attendance, she never spoke up) and was friends with artists such as Jack Tworkov, Joan Mitchell, Jane Wilson, and John Gruen. During the 1950s she exhibited at the Tanager and Stable Galleries before joining André Emmerich, one of the rare serious galleries to include women in his stable, where she showed regularly from 1958 to 1976.

The heroic scale and gestural reach of her paintings in the 1950s demonstrate Schapiro’s ambition to be reckoned with alongside the Ab-Ex big boys. Two works in the National Academy exhibition, Fanfare (1958) and Façade (1959), exemplify Schapiro’s engagement with the ideas of her generation and antecedents (Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Mitchell). However technically accomplished, these paintings feel derivative; they demonstrate what Paul Brach (including his own work) meant when he wrote “Perhaps our generation was starting to realize that we had inherited a successful revolution,” and that “Our gestural abstractions came too easily. They needed some resistance. In Mimi’s case it was geometry.” In 1962, Schapiro began a series of “shrine” paintings with stacked compartments that contained icons of the studio and femininity (paint tubes: masculine, egg: feminine). The shrines remind me of Medieval altarpieces with their classical arches and precious metals, just as they reference the artist’s painful quest for a unified identity, and self-acceptance as a woman and an artist. The cool purity of Silver Windows (1967), with its mitered grid lays down the rules of the game for the geometric works to follow.

In 1967 Mimi and Paul moved to California where he became chair of the art department at the University of California San Diego. When they arrived, the man who had promised a position for Mimi told him that there was none. Paul threatened to break his contract, and a lecturer position was found for Mimi. Working with David Nabilof, a young physicist at the university, Schapiro was able to manipulate and transform her geometric drawings. She harnessed the new technology to try new compositional variations after painting Big Ox (1967) on view at the National Academy.

Composed of four enormous truss-like “limbs” intersecting a central, open octagon, Big Ox, and its companion painting Side Ox (at Firestone) are realized in electric hues of cadmium orange, silver, and pink acrylic paint so saturated that these paintings have an almost sonic impact, like a jackhammer pulverizing concrete. Schapiro’s radical pinks— from the rosy hues of Giovanni Sassetta’s altarpieces to the intestinal color of Pepto Bismol—were all about secrets and private places. This work also looks like a direct response to Ronald Bladen’s X, (1967), a monumental aluminum sculpture that had been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery that year.

The Ox paintings became icons of female power, eventually claimed by Schapiro and Judy Chicago (her partner in founding the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts) as the first example of “central core imagery.” While in 1968 she explained that Big Ox was inspired “by the thought of a large, imposing sense of landscape coming toward the viewer and inviting him to become part of it, Schapiro later described it as her “explicit cunt painting (that) was a real cry in the darkness…for something besides the symbol of the phallus.” Indeed, for many early feminist artists geometric abstraction was a formal device for encoding the ideas of a female aesthetic domain that would eventually challenge the hegemony of a male-dominated art world.

In California, the slick surfaces associated with industrial fabrication, spray painting techniques, automotive lacquers, and plastics were very much in vogue among the artists associated with Finish-Fetish and Light and Space who placed a West Coast stamp on East Coast minimalism. But Schapiro, who could see the Pacific Ocean from her rented La Jolla house, was inspired by the light and water of her adopted environment. Keyhole, whose monumental, synthetic “body” projects like an industrial piston into the viewer’s space, also floats on a vapor-sprayed ground that could equally be a sky from Tiepolo or Venice Beach.

By 1972, when she created Dollhouse (installed within Womanhouse) in collaboration with artist Sherry Brody, Schapiro had redefined collage as femmage, establishing a continuity between high art collage and works made by anonymous women using traditional craft materials. In their playfully illustrated essay “Waste Not, Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled,” a classic feminist text that was first published in the magazine Heresies, Schapiro and artist Melissa Meyer laid out historic precedents and criteria for femmage. As Meyer remembers it, during a meeting at Joyce Kozloff’s loft, Mimi had a phone call with the art critic Grace Glueck and together they coined the term “femmage.”

Reflecting this deepening interest in domestic materials, Flying Carpet (1972), at Eric Firestone, reveals the fragment of a staircase seen through a tear in a tilted rectangle (carpet). This transitional work includes bits and pieces of Japanese paper and calico-patterned wallpapers and fabrics that break through the painting’s interior boundaries. With its allusion to Middle-Eastern textiles and myth, Schapiro must have been charged up about the fact that she was finding a way to move beyond the pure, hard-edged abstractions by way of materials that were cut, torn, frayed and literally pliable.

From the mid to late 1970s, Schapiro was a leader of Pattern and Decoration movement. Coming to a variety of conclusions in their own work, these artists were nevertheless unified by the consciousness-raising dialogues of the Women’s Movement as well as a shared interest in the ornament and decorative arts traditions (especially ceramics, textiles, and gardens, and architecture) from around the world.

Schapiro’s dedication to forging an artistic language that would recast women’s work, along with the varied phases of her production, has yielded a rich inheritance. Look at Carrie Moyer’s poured and stenciled paintings, the arena for what she describes an “erotics of craft,” or Mickalene Thomas’s explorations of female erotic power and mind-bending domestic interiors that incorporate (gender-indeterminate) rhinestones, copper pots, animal prints, and fake wood paneling. Consciously or not, these artists channel Schapiro who can be thought of as their enabling Athena.

The post Icons of Female Power: Early Works of Miriam Schapiro appeared first on artcritical.

In 1977 Nina Yankowitz suggested I attend a meeting at Joyce Kozloff’s loft for a preliminary discussion about the fourth issue of the Heresies Collective entitled Heresies: Women’s Traditional Arts: The Politics of Aesthetics. We sat around in a circle and each of us was asked to speak about what she was interested in. When it came time for me to speak, I said nervously with my little, low voice, “I’m interested in why so many women made collages.” At the end of the meeting Miriam Schapiro came up to me and said, “I want to work with you on that.” I thought, “Oh my God she is going to swallow me up — this strong, forceful woman!” But actually at some later point in our collaboration, she said to me “Melissa, do you think you could keep quiet for a minute so I could get a word in?” During one of our meetings, Mimi had a phone call with Grace Glueck and they came up with the name, “Femmage.”

I feel lucky to have met Mimi. At the time, collaborating with an older artist was important for me, while she also appreciated and benefitted from my perspective. We had a lot of fun as we worked on our research and writing, and her energy and committed work ethic was contagious. It was a wonderful moment for both of us, personally and professionally. I am happy that I could participate in conceptualizing and developing ideas that would remain valuable to Mimi and to myself. That “Femmage” has been anthologized and is still relevant to students and artists is a testimony and lasting memory to the art and character of Miriam Schapiro, as it is to the groundbreaking and exciting context in which we wrote it.  MELISSA MEYER

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Exhibitions considered in this review: Joyce Kozloff: Social Studies at French Institute: Alliance Française, February 25 to April 25, 2015; Joyce Kozloff: Maps + Patterns at DC Moore Gallery, March 26 to April 25; Mapping Brooklyn at BRIC, February 26 to May 3, 2015 and at the Brooklyn Historical Society, February 26 to September 6, 2015

Maps have always sought to express more than mere geographical information. In ancient Assyrian carved stones, traditional compass-based cartographic inferences sat alongside pointers to more epic, mythic realms at the very edges of the earth. In medieval mappaemundi the contorted shapes of Europe, Africa, and Asia appeared pockmarked not just with major rivers and cites but with biblical events and monstrous races. In the maps of the modern period this same terrain was re-imagined as a political geography, with emergent states and historic empires battling for prominence across documents that drew cultural borders and affirmed legal assertions to territory. Today, even, Google Maps allows us to pepper the ground beneath our feet with personalized information of our own or of our peers: routes and recommendations layered atop of streets in a manipulatable, ever-evolving cityscape.

These ideas of subjectivity and fiction make maps particularly fertile ground for those contemporary artists who, like cartographers for millennia before them, remain invested in both expressing and re-shaping the world around them. Perhaps foremost amongst them is Jocye Kozloff, whose work appears in recent exhibitions in four spaces across New York City: at DC Moore Gallery, the Alliance Française, BRIC, and the Brooklyn Historical Society.

First rising to prominence in the early 1970s as an original member of the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kozloff became known as much for her politics as her work. She advocated against the dominance of a predominantly painterly, male, and overly-conceptual art world, arguing for the patterned and the decorative – with its sense of craft, femininity, repetition, triviality, and a more colorful or traditional “beauty” — as a foil to this status quo. As Kozloff wrote in her 1976 statement, “10 Approaches to the Decorative,” (a withering rejoinder to the Minimalist “negations’l” of Ad Reinhardt et al.), work must be: “anti-pure, anti-purist, anti-puritanical, anti-minimalist, anti-post minimalist, anti-reductivist, anti-formalist, anti-pristine, anti-austere…” In place of these negations Kozloff affirmed the “subjective, romantic, imaginative, personal, autobiographical, whimsical, narrative, decorative, lyrical…”

It is not hard to see how the cartographic, with all its intricacies, subjectivities, and imagination, might become incorporated into such a project. Formally, the tessellated, patchwork blocks of pieces like Hidden Chambers (1975-76) or the more recent If I Were An Astronomer (Mediterranean) (2014) recall plan views of cityscapes or the repeated contour lines of geographical surveys; and materially too, her ceramic floor and wall mosaics, such as An Interior Decorated (1978-79) or Tile Wainscot (1979-81), evoke the sixth-century map of the Byzantine world set into the floor of the church of Saint George in Madaba, Jordan.

But more often, historical maps are deliberately knitted into her two-dimensional works, recreating and then reworking them in a number of different ways. Two of Kozloff’s contributions to Mapping Brooklyn (BRIC and BHS), Waves (2015), rework maps of the borough with her trademark patterns that serve to draw focus onto or away from particular aspects of the original cartography: swirling patchwork rivers lead the eye towards the monotone land, or streets blocked out in green washes and red tessellated stickers ping out amongst otherwise white street grids. At the Alliance Française, collaged octopi stretch their tentacles portentously over classroom maps of Europe; the didactic qualities of geographical and historical knowledge merge with a playful air of schoolchild fantasy that the contents of textbooks enjoy amongst their intended readership. Elsewhere in her work, the recent The Tempest (2014), beveled squares of traditional South Asian maps act as a backdrop for appliqué figures with a more political edge. Masculine military figurines — the sort of guys with a tendency to carve up and dominate the mapped land beneath them — abound in cut-out roundels, while counteracting these, the hemispherical domes of halved globes rise from the canvas, maternal and breast-like, their brass-embossed spinning tips transformed into pointed metallic nipples.

The political and the decorative remain intertwined in Kozloff’s work, the urgency of her social commentary never far from view. This is felt most keenly in one of her largest and most affecting works, Targets (1999-2000), a sculptural arrangement of 24 curved canvases into a nine-foot walk-in globe, the centrepiece of Mapping Brooklyn. From the outside, the cartographic sense of a constructed world could not be more apparent. A structural, wooden, rib-like shell, is held together by exposed bolts to create a definable yet insistently fictional sphere for the viewer to enter. Upon stepping through a removable segment into the shape, stooping one’s way to a sonically muffled space, one is struck first visually by the surrounding canvases: abstract (but not minimalist), the segmented and patinated blocks appeal to an aesthetic that runs throughout Kosloff’s work, bright tones and wiggly bands of contoured color creating a patchwork sense of stepped and enveloping depth. Yet upon closer inspection, the markings on the maps are not only abstract colours and more typical cartographics — city names, roads, compass points, and weather signals — but also the hatched vertical and horizontal notches of a target scope. Red pinpoints of heat seeking missiles and the coordinates of radar grids shift perception from the artistic to the militaristic: each location represented is in fact a site of major US military activity since the Second World War, their unnervingly close-cropped focus in this pre-9/11 work a prescient foreshadowing of the Drone Wars of today.

The appearance of Kozloff’s art in happy coincidence across three contemporaneous shows seems to mark a moment of reflection on a career stretching back over forty years. But if anything, the simultaneous presence of her work across the city serves to emphasize Kozloff’s consistency, and her constitution for a change in world perceptions: not just a reclaiming of the mapped geographical world, but of the art landscape too.

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