COLLAGE ON VIEW
Surface/Depth: The Decorative after Miriam Schapiro
at the Museum of Arts & Design
in New York, New York, USA
22 March-9 September 2018
“Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro” showcases twenty-nine collage paintings by the pioneering feminist artist Miriam Schapiro in conversation with twenty-eight works by nine contemporary artists: Sanford Biggers, Josh Blackwell, Edie Fake, Jeffrey Gibson, Judy Ledgerwood, Jodie Mack, Sara Rahbar, Ruth Root, and Jasmin Sian. Bringing into focus the key, but unheralded, role Schapiro played in the reframing of craft and decoration in the American art world, this juxtaposition of historic and contemporary work highlights ways in which the decorative continues to be utilized as a critical tool in art today.
“As an institution founded to combat the dismissal of craft as a lesser creative practice and that from its beginning supported the careers of women artists, there couldn’t be a better time for MAD to highlight Miriam Schapiro,” said Elissa Auther, MAD’s Windgate Research and Collections Curator. “Many contemporary artists outside of the studio-craft tradition of the 1950s and 1960s now work across the fields of art and craft, openly using techniques and materials traditionally associated with craft in ways unheard of even a decade ago, and Schapiro is an important, but unacknowledged, source for that phenomenon.”
Historically marginalized as ornament, pattern, or craft, decoration is often dismissed as mere surface, an attractive object with no underlying depth or meaning. To this day, to dismiss a work of art as “decorative” is to judge it as minor, reveling in surface-level expression over any commitment to intellectual rigor or cultural critique. In the early 1970s, within the context of the women’s art movement, Schapiro reappropriated the decorative in a new type of work she would come to call femmage (a combination of feminine and collage), a collage-painting hybrid inspired by women’s domestic arts and handicrafts.
Her objective in embracing the decorative was to catalyze a seismic transformation in the perception of materials, processes, and styles rooted in craft, women’s experience in the home, and everyday forms of making, recasting practices like embroidery, crochet, paper crafts, and even decoupage as legitimately artistic. For Schapiro, the absence of such work from the cultural record was a reflection of the broader patriarchal devaluation of the woman artist, and she viewed her work as a feminist intervention in the history of art.
In “Surface/Depth”, Schapiro’s twenty-nine works on view are exhibited alongside a range of archival material, including her writings, fabric swatches, costume jewelry, and women’s needlework, all of which contextualize her invention of the femmage by illustrating the rich vein of material culture she mined.
Biggers, Blackwell, Fake, Gibson, Ledgerwood, Mack, Rahbar, Root, and Sian expand Schapiro’s initial exploration of the decorative as a language of abstraction tied to the personal and the political. Like Schapiro, these artists refuse received opinion of the decorative as artistically trivial and use abstract, decorative elements to address a range of topics and concerns—from gender, racial, and sexual identity to issues of aesthetic hierarchy, migration, community, and loss—exposing the hollowness of the surface/depth divide and the separation of appearance from meaning.
(adapted from the museum’s press materials)
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Image: top
The Beauty of Summer
by Miriam Schapiro
50″x70″
acrylic, fabric on canvas
1973-1974
© Miriam Schapiro/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery
Image: center
Flag #4 Champions
by Sara Rahbar
69″x39″
mixed media
2006-2013
Courtesy of the artist and Carbon 12