Miriam Schapiro | Feminist, artist, 91
Miriam Schapiro, 91, who with artist Judy Chicago founded the feminist art program at California Institute of the Arts and created arresting "femmages," as she called them, from handkerchiefs, doilies, beads, baubles, and fabric contributed by admiring women around the U.S., died June 20 at the home of her caregiver in Hampton Bays, N.Y.
Miriam Schapiro, 91, who with artist Judy Chicago founded the feminist art program at California Institute of the Arts and created arresting "femmages," as she called them, from handkerchiefs, doilies, beads, baubles, and fabric contributed by admiring women around the U.S., died June 20 at the home of her caregiver in Hampton Bays, N.Y.
Ms. Schapiro had dementia for several years. Her death was confirmed by Judith Brodsky, the executor of her estate.
As a young artist in New York, Ms. Schapiro poured herself into abstract Expressionism and then created what she called her "shrine paintings" - homages to great art of the past, each spanned by a high arch and punctuated with an egg, the universal symbol of fertility.