Featuring 29 works by Schapiro alongside works by Sanford Biggers, Josh Blackwell, Edie Fake, Jeffrey Gibson, Judy Ledgerwood, Jodie Mack, Sara Rahbar, Ruth Root, and Jasmin Sian
Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro
March 22, 2018 – September 9, 2018
Press Preview: March 22, 2018, at 5 pm
Image: Miriam Schapiro, Flying Carpet, 1972 © Miriam Schapiro/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery
New York, NY (March 14, 2018)
From March 22 to September 9, 2018, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) presents Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro, an exhibition that 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.
SELECTED EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
ABOUT ELISSA AUTHER
Elissa Auther joined the Curatorial Department of the Museum of Arts and Design and the faculty of the Bard Graduate Center in the fall of 2015. She has published widely on a diverse set of topics, including the history of modernism and its relationship to craft, the material culture of the American Counterculture, and feminist art. Her monograph, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), focuses on the broad utilization of fiber in art of the 1960s and 1970s and the changing hierarchical relationship between art and craft expressed by the medium’s new visibility. Auther is also an accomplished curator. In 2012, she co-curated the exhibition West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 and edited the accompanying catalogue. Most recently, she co-curated Pretty/Dirty, the retrospective exhibition of the painter and photographer Marilyn Minter, and Improvisational Gestures,a survey exhibition of the sculptor and performance artist Senga Nengudi, both of which were also accompanied by scholarly publications. A feminist public intellectual, Auther co-directs Feminism & Co.: Art, Sex, Politics, a public program at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver that focuses on issues of women and gender through the lens of creative practice. A testament to her advocacy of feminist art and culture is her recent opinion piece for Slate.com in defense of the relationship between feminist material culture and lifestyle as a political identity.
EXHIBITION CREDITS
Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro is curated by Elissa Auther, MAD’s Windgate Research and Collections Curator, with the support of Assistant Manager of Curatorial Affairs Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy.
Leading support for Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro is provided by Michele and Marty Cohen. Additional support is generously provided by The Coby Foundation, Ltd., The Feminist Institute, Eric Firestone Gallery and The Estate of Miriam Schapiro, Sharon Karmazin, Laura and Lewis Kruger, and Anthony Meier Fine Arts.
Research for this exhibition was supported by a Craft Research Fund grant from the Center for Craft.
RELATED PROGRAMMING: MADactivates
Encounter | Tour and Conversation of ‘Surface/Depth’
With featured artists Josh Blackwell, Edie Fake, Judy Ledgerwood, Jodie Mack, Sara Rahbar, and Ruth Root
Thursday, March 22, 2018 – 6:30 to 8:00 pm
Free with Pay-What-You-Wish Admission
4th and 5th floor galleries at MAD
Join Elissa Auther, MAD’s Windgate Research and Collections Curator, for an in-gallery 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 that consider the decorative as a language of abstraction tied to the personal and the political.
Cinema | Posthaste Perennial Patterns: Talk and Screening of Recent Works by Jodie Mack
Thursday, May 31, 2018 – 6:30 to 8:00 pm
The Theater at MAD
Using domestic and recycled materials, this program illuminates formal and cursory elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. Questioning the role of decoration in daily life, the works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects.
Cinema | The Mood Mosaic Shorts Program
Curated by Jodie Mack
Thursday, June 7, 2018 – 6:30 to 8:00 pm
The Theater at MAD
Objects and collections take center stage in this program, which offers a parade of motifs from the ornamental to the lexical.
ABOUT THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) champions contemporary makers across creative fields and presents the work of artists, designers, and artisans who apply the highest level of ingenuity and skill. Since the Museum’s founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all facets of making and the creative processes by which materials are transformed, from traditional techniques to cutting-edge technologies. Today, the Museum’s curatorial program builds upon a rich history of exhibitions that emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design, and reveals the workmanship behind the objects and environments that shape our everyday lives. MAD provides an international platform for practitioners who are influencing the direction of cultural production and driving twenty-first-century innovation, and fosters a participatory setting for visitors to have direct encounters with skilled making and compelling works of art and design.
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