Schapiro, 91, pioneered feminist art movement

When Miriam Schapiro took a break from her career as a painter and moved from New York to California in 1967, it was for her husband’s job.

By the time the couple returned to New York eight years later, she had established herself as a pioneer feminist and an accomplished artist exploring forms that never had been seriously considered by the art intelligentsia in Manhattan. Attracting thousands of viewers and drawing international headlines, her most visible California project was “Womanhouse,” a condemned Los Angeles mansion that she, artist Judy Chicago, and 21 of their students and friends turned into a colorful, idiosyncratic, symbol-laden, humorrich, round-the-clock women’s art happening.

Schapiro, who with 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. She was 91.

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, 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. All the while, she was searching, in vain, for “the Madame Curie of art.”

Accompanying her husband Paul Brach to his teaching job at the University of California, San Diego, she became a lecturer there. In 1970, when Brach became Cal Arts’ first art dean, she and Chicago founded the school’s feminist art program — an unknown idea elsewhere but, as she recalled in a 1989 oral history, hardly out of place at the fledgling art institute.

“At Cal Arts at that time, they were doing the most amazing things,” she told an interviewer for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Born Nov. 15, 1923, in Toronto, Schapiro grew up in Brooklyn. Her father, an artist and industrial designer, recognized her talent early and lied about her age when she was 14 to get her into a drawing class with a nude model. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in art from the University of Iowa.

Schapiro’s husband died in 2007. She is survived by her son, Peter von Brandenburg.