Benefit Prints
Miriam Schapiro, In the Land of Oo-bla-dee: Homage to Mary Lou Williams, 1993
Miriam Schapiro, In the Land of Oo-bla-dee: Homage
to
Mary Lou Williams, 1993, six-color lithograph
on white
Rives (cut out and hinged onto Folio Gray),
22 x 30 in.,
edition of 100
Price
Sold out.
About the Print
In 1993, Miriam Schapiro and the Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking (renamed the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions in 2006) collaborated to produce the first limited-edition print to benefit CAA’s newly established program of Professional Development Fellowships.
Upon the initial release of the print, which the artist titled In the Land of Go-bla-dee: Homage to Mary Lou Williams, Judith K. Brodsky wrote: “As usual, Schapiro is involved in breaking through to new ideas. The print she has created with the collaborating Rutgers master printer, Eileen Foti, has six color runs. The colors are brilliant, highly saturated ones that create striking optical contrasts. By cutting the fan out and hinging it to a soft gray background, the print takes on the object quality of an actual fan. The patterns in the fan are related to jazz images. Male artists like Stuart Davis have staked out jazz motifs on their own, and we forget that women as well as men are integral to jazz. It’s hard to think of a woman artist who has claimed jazz motifs for her own as Schapiro has done in this image, which is an homage to Mary Lou Williams, one of the earliest women jazz composers.”
The fan shape is closely associated with Schapiro, a seminal artist of the feminist art movement and beyond. She had worked in an abstract, formalist mode during the 1960s, but in the early 1970s came to feel that the painting she was doing no longer had meaning for her in the context of the emerging discourse on gender. At first Schapiro invested her abstract forms with new meanings that referred to her thoughts about women; she subsequently moved to figuration and to pattern and decoration. In addition to changing her images, Schapiro also wanted to transform the very nature of the painting process. She incorporated fabric onto her painted surfaces, a technique she named femmage.
Schapiro has contributed to the teaching of art in numerous ways. In 1971 she created the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts, in collaboration with the artist Judy Chicago. She also served on the CAA Board of Directors from 1974 to 1978 and regularly appeared as a panelist on Annual Conference sessions. CAA honored Schapiro with its Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2002.
Contact
For more information on benefit prints, please contact Hannah O’Reilly Malyn, CAA development associate, at 212-392-4435.
