Few painters make a stronger case that pattern can carry a whole composition than Miriam Schapiro. Her mature canvases are shaped like folding fans or spread kimonos, and their surfaces are built from strips of printed cotton, lace and paint laid into strict radial or rectangular divisions. The result looks loud at first and then turns out to be carefully ordered. This guide looks at what to study in her work, the dates and works that can be confirmed from museum and scholarly sources, how she made the pieces, and how a designer can use the same ideas in layouts, packaging and surface design today.
A note on images: Schapiro’s works remain in copyright, and none of the museum records checked for this guide is flagged public domain or CC0. The works are therefore described in text only, with the museums that hold them named, and nothing here suggests they are free to reuse. For openly licensed material you can work with, browse the MGD museum collection of public-domain art.
Who was Miriam Schapiro?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection record gives her as American, born in Canada, with the line “Toronto 1923–2015 Hampton Bays, New York.” Biographies from Tandem Press at the University of Wisconsin and an obituary reprinted by Veteran Feminists of America both place her birth in Toronto in 1923 and describe her family as artists. She studied at the University of Iowa, where several biographical sources record that she took her BA, MA and MFA degrees in the 1940s.
In 1971 she and Judy Chicago set up the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s research site West by Midwest describes the program and notes that it built on a course Chicago had begun at Fresno State a year earlier. Early in 1972 the two artists and their students staged Womanhouse in a disused house in Los Angeles. MCA Chicago and the obituary both credit Schapiro and Chicago with the project; Schapiro’s own contribution was Dollhouse, a miniature house fitted with furniture and accessories made from scraps. MCA Chicago records that she left CalArts in 1975 and moved back to New York.
Schapiro is often linked with her colleague Nancy Spero, another artist whose feminist work of the 1970s reshaped what counted as serious material for art.
Femmage and the Pattern and Decoration tendency
“Femmage” is Schapiro’s own word. In the essay “Waste Not Want Not,” written with Melissa Meyer and published in the late 1970s, she used it for collage, assemblage, découpage and photomontage made by women, and for the long tradition of quilts, samplers and scrapbooks behind them. The point was to treat domestic textile craft as a source for painting rather than as a lesser art.
That aim linked her with Pattern and Decoration, a loose grouping of American artists in the 1970s who used ornament, textiles and repeat patterns in large paintings at a moment when minimal and conceptual art dominated galleries. Schapiro’s contribution was to fuse it with feminist argument: the fabrics in her paintings are the kinds of material historically handled by women at home, placed inside forms (fans, robes, houses) with strong associations of their own.
If you want the folk and craft background behind this way of thinking, our guide to folk art traditions covers quilts, samplers and painted objects in more depth.
What to look at in a Miriam Schapiro fan
The Met’s Barcelona Fan (1979) is the clearest example to study. The museum lists it as fabric and acrylic on canvas, roughly 72 inches high and 12 feet wide, and its catalogue text describes it as a femmage made after she moved from California to New York. Here is what a designer should notice.
- Composition. The canvas is a half-circle. The surface is divided into wedges radiating from a hub at the bottom centre and into concentric bands, so every patch of fabric sits inside a clear geometric cell. The shape is a ready-made grid: radial lines give rhythm, bands give hierarchy.
- Palette. The Met describes areas of paint and pieces of cut fabric and lace in bold, contrasting colours. Strong reds, pinks and saturated blues sit next to each other without softening transitions, and painted areas act as rest zones between the busier printed fabrics.
- Line. There is little drawn line. Edges come from the cut fabric itself, from the seams between wedges and from painted borders, so the structure reads through contrast rather than outline.
- Scale. A household object, the hand fan, is enlarged to the width of a wall. That jump in scale is what makes ordinary cloth read as monumental.
The Jewish Museum in New York lists a related work, Blue Burst Fan (1979), as acrylic and collage on canvas, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington holds Mechanoflower Fan. Looking at several fans side by side shows how she reused one armature with different fillings, much as a designer reuses a template.
Key works and career outline
Only works with a date and holder confirmed by a museum or scholarly source are listed here.
- 1971: co-founds the Feminist Art Program at CalArts with Judy Chicago (MCA Chicago; Judy Chicago’s tribute in Artforum).
- 1972: Womanhouse, Los Angeles, with Chicago and their students; Schapiro makes Dollhouse (MCA Chicago; obituary).
- 1976: Anatomy of a Kimono, a long multi-panel painting of kimono and obi shapes. The University of Michigan’s art image collection and a dealer chronology both date it to 1976; published measurements vary, so treat it simply as a wall-length work.
- 1979: Barcelona Fan (The Met) and Blue Burst Fan (Jewish Museum, New York).
- 2007: Court Jester, a digital print with hand lithography in the Femfolio portfolio of works by feminist artists (The Met).
She died in 2015 in Hampton Bays, New York, according to the Met’s record and the obituary.
Technique: paint, cloth and the shaped canvas
Schapiro’s method combined two habits. From painting she kept the large stretched canvas, the shaped format and areas of flat acrylic colour. From textile craft she took the cut-and-glue logic of collage and quilting: pieces of printed cotton, lace, ribbon and handkerchiefs laid in and fixed to the surface. The Met’s medium line for Barcelona Fan, “fabric and acrylic on canvas,” sums up the mix.
The craft lesson is in the order of operations. The structure (fan, robe, house) is set first; fabric is chosen and placed cell by cell; paint then unifies, outlines or calms the result. That is close to how a pattern designer builds a repeat tile before choosing colourways, and our pattern design guide walks through the same steps for digital work.
How designers can borrow Schapiro’s ideas today
- Use a strong silhouette as a grid. A fan, a kimono or a house outline gives you a container. Divide it radially or into panels and treat each cell as a slot for one pattern, photo or colour. This works well for posters, social tiles and event branding.
- Mix pattern, but control the cells. Florals, checks and stripes can live together if every one sits inside a clean boundary. The structure does the calming work so the patterns do not have to.
- Give the eye rest areas. Schapiro set flat painted zones between busy fabrics. In a layout, flat colour blocks between textured or photographic panels play the same role.
- Collect your own swatches. Scan real fabrics, wrapping paper or household textiles you own or have rights to, then build a palette from them. Sample colours from your own scans with a colour picker rather than copying a reproduction of her paintings.
- Scale up the domestic. Enlarging an everyday object (a handkerchief, an apron, a fan) to poster or wall size changes how viewers read it. Packaging and exhibition graphics can use the same jump.
When you need source imagery that is openly licensed, start from our guide to public-domain art and use museum textiles and samplers flagged public domain as raw material for your own femmage-style experiments.
Frequently asked questions
What is Miriam Schapiro known for?
She is known for femmage, her term for collage made from fabric, lace and other textiles combined with paint, and for large fan- and kimono-shaped canvases such as Barcelona Fan (1979), now at The Met. She also co-founded the Feminist Art Program at CalArts with Judy Chicago in 1971.
What does femmage mean?
Schapiro and Melissa Meyer used the word in their essay “Waste Not Want Not” for collage, assemblage, découpage and photomontage made by women, linking those techniques to quilts, samplers and other domestic craft.
Was Miriam Schapiro part of Pattern and Decoration?
Yes. Her textile-and-paint canvases of the 1970s are regularly grouped with the Pattern and Decoration tendency, which brought ornament and craft-based repeat patterns into large-scale painting.
Can I use images of Miriam Schapiro’s work in my designs?
Her works are still in copyright, and the museum records checked here are not flagged public domain. Study them for ideas, but build your own patterns and use only images you have rights to or that a museum flags public domain or CC0.
