Miriam Schapiro: 1967-1972

Witness the pivotal artistic evolution of a groundbreaking feminist artist through a focused collection of monumental paintings created during a transformative period in her career. Miriam Schapiro: 1967-1972 will be on view from April 17 through October 26 at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA).

This concise exhibition examines a crucial developmental phase in Schapiro's work, tracing her journey from hard-edge geometric abstraction to her distinctive "central core imagery" with gendered, anthropomorphic qualities. The selected works lay the foundation for her later explorations of collage and craft within the Pattern and Decoration movement, while highlighting her pioneering experiments with early digital image production technologies—work that presages contemporary approaches to feminist and digital art.

While much feminist art of the 1970s focused on interior spaces and domesticity, Schapiro's visual language was also informed by the vast Southern California landscape and her engagement with emerging computer technologies after relocating from New York to San Diego. The exhibition includes hard-edge paintings such as Canyon (1967) and Rosarita's Blocks (1968), which reflect the rock formations and vernacular architecture of her new environment.

A centerpiece of the exhibition, Big Ox (1967), represents one of Schapiro's first "central core" paintings, featuring a vivid orange "X" against a silver ground with a circular opening at its center—imagery that sparked new discourse about inherently female iconography and artistic self-assertion. This work is accompanied by large-scale paintings depicting three-dimensional forms rendered in red or yellow hues, with distorted perspectives and dramatic angles creating a sense of monumentality.

The exhibition traces Schapiro's collaboration with the computer science department at the University of California, San Diego beginning in 1969, where she utilized early digital technologies to create drawings of interlocking volumes that she would later translate into paintings. Her "Mylar Series" (1970-71) features enamel and tape compositions that appear to float on reflective surfaces—work that Schapiro herself described as "a culmination of total self-assertion."

The presentation concludes with two early Pattern and Decoration works—Lady Gengi's Maze and Flying Carpet (both 1972)—that combine geometric architectural elements with collaged fabric, pointing toward the textile-based practice that would define Schapiro's later career.

Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015) was a key figure in American feminist art, perhaps best known for co-directing the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts with Judy Chicago, which produced the collaborative installation Womanhouse (1972). Her work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art,\ and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.