Review: Hello Doily
Miriam Schapiro’s name is linked irrevocably to the feminist movement of the 1970s. And justly so. Schapiro, who died in 2015, viewed her art as a vehicle for social change. Her idealism has in some ways worked against her, encouraging viewers to think of her work as a manifesto-in-paint, with all that implies about the elevation of politics over visual verve.
So, on a recent visit to the Museum of Arts and Design, I was not prepared for the thrill of Schapiro’s work — the cleverness, the edginess, the spirit of playfulness that undergirds even her most monumental efforts. The show is called “Surface/Depth: The Decorative after Miriam Schapiro,” and it juxtaposes 29 of her works with those by nine younger artists whom she influenced. I found the Schapiro part of the show more compelling than the rest, so much so that it made me wish for a full-scale Schapiro retrospective. Anyone out there working on one?
Schapiro called her paintings “femmages,” meaning that she incorporated feminine-themed collage material into her canvases. Much of her source material looks as if it could have been pulled from your grandmother’s sewing basket — think of buttons, swatches of fabric, glitter, a handkerchief sweetly embroidered with the message “Greetings from England.” I know of no other artist who so brilliantly infused the geometric grid of Minimalism with the nostalgic charm of hand-crocheted doilies and other homespun crafts.
Despite the small size of the show, the museum has done a wonderful job of conveying the shifts and turns in Schapiro’s development. It gets off to a marvelously lucid start with “Silver Windows” (1967) a large-scale grid of 16 rectangles, each of which is enclosed in a frame. In “Voyage” (1973), the framed window evolves into a kitchen window complete with fluttering hot-pink curtains and flowers that resemble window decals. In the early ‘80s, her paintings became even more ornate, and she was criticized for heart-shaped canvases in which mounds of decorative material glow against a black ground.
I hardly need to emphasize that the appropriation of so-called craft material is a major preoccupation among artists now. Schapiro was there first, and I hope her name does not disappear from history. I happened to check the Whitney Museum website to see what paintings of hers the museum owns, and nothing came up. Nada. This suggests that Schapiro was not as appreciated in her own time as she is in ours, a sure sign that she was onto something big.
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