Join Elissa Auther, MAD’s Windgate Research and Collections Curator, for a tour and conversation with six contemporary artists featured in Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro. Beginning in the 5th floor galleries, Auther will provide a brief overview of the exhibition before introducing the first of four short conversations with featured contemporary artists staged throughout the galleries.

Surface/Depth highlights the pivotal role Miriam Schapiro’s work and leadership played in the expansion of the art world to include historically marginalized forms of craft, decoration, and abstract patterning associated with femininity and women’s work. Although she is unheralded as the source, the influence of Schapiro’s subjective approach to forms of decoration can be identified today in a remarkably diverse group of artists who continue to find inspiration in her embrace of artistic practices outside the art historical canon.

To highlight this legacy, Auther will be joined by select group of contemporary artists, including Josh Blackwell, Edie Fake, Judy Ledgerwood, Jodie Mack, Sara Rahbar, and Ruth Root, for conversations that considers the decorative as a language of abstraction tied to the personal and the political.