Mira SCHOR explores a creative life that embraces political activism, critical research, and painterly richness, drawing upon both Apollonian and Dionysian impulses, working as a painter who writes and a painter whose image is often language itself.
Schor has written, “I will not give up the critical and intellectual or the visual and intuitive, so I see that the task ahead is to continue to insist that both ways of being as an artist can and even must exist in the same works and in the same practice. So, like Persephone, I do live in two worlds. “At times Schor has referred to her work as things, not only the three dimensional works on paper she created in the 70s and 80s, but also the small oil paintings she has created since the 80s, in recognition of the objectness of the stretched canvas and of the materiality of paint itself. At the same time even when Schor focused on the material of paper, she has always called herself a painter. In the 1980s and 90s, when a double standard emerged, in which painting was both critiqued yet also held in highest regard, at least in the art market -but only for male artists, while women and specifically feminist artists were encouraged to work in performance art and photobased media- Schor focused her studio practice on painting, insisting on bringing together a language-based conceptualism and political consciousness with the language of painting.
In recent works on paper and in oil on linen, Schor confronts mortality in the face of historical ambition and depicts the painter as a transformative link between nature, the body, and language. These recent works are self-portraits of the Woman Artist who is, in terms of art world fads, both “too young” and “not dead enough. ” These uncompromising, darkly funny and confrontational female “Power” Figures -half naked, half young, half dead, fielding questions and demands from the world and from ghosts presences of youthful alter-egos- are nevertheless painted and drawn on fragile tracing paper, creating a contradictory message about power and meaning in relation to feminist identity, female embodiment, and links between image, materiality, and language in a manner that is emblematic of her art practice going back to the 1970s.
For her contribution to RE-ACTION, Schor has chosen to respond directly to August Sanders' 1926 photograph, Painter (1926), side-stepping the previous responses in her drift, which in keeping with the medium of the Sanders' initiatory image and with contemporary trends towards the photographic, textual and cinematic, are themselves not paintings though they drift/riff off of a photograph of a man denoted as “Painter”. For the project, she has created a painting on paper of a woman painting with her whole body, a painting which can be shipped across international borders almost though not quite as easily as through the internet, in order to give a small example of the materiality and immediacy of a painting touched by a human hand, in this case the hand of a woman painter.
Mira Schor is a New York-based artist and writer. Her work has been included in exhibitions at The Jewish Museum (NY); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); MoMA/PS1(NY); Neuberger Museum (NY) and Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield). Interviews with Schor have appeared on Art21Blog; Bomblog; Hyperallergic; Artinfo and Culture Catch. She participated in ARTspace's Annual Distinguished Artists' Interviews at the 2013 Annual College Art Association Conference in New York. She is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2009); Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (1997; both Duke University Press) and of the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is the co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.
Schor is the recipient of many prestigious awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting; a Pollock-Krasner Grant; College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism and Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is an Associate Teaching Professor in Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design. She is represented by Lyles and King Gallery (NY) and by CB1 Gallery (Los Angeles).
Mira Schor lives and works in NY (USA).
Schor has written, “I will not give up the critical and intellectual or the visual and intuitive, so I see that the task ahead is to continue to insist that both ways of being as an artist can and even must exist in the same works and in the same practice. So, like Persephone, I do live in two worlds. “At times Schor has referred to her work as things, not only the three dimensional works on paper she created in the 70s and 80s, but also the small oil paintings she has created since the 80s, in recognition of the objectness of the stretched canvas and of the materiality of paint itself. At the same time even when Schor focused on the material of paper, she has always called herself a painter. In the 1980s and 90s, when a double standard emerged, in which painting was both critiqued yet also held in highest regard, at least in the art market -but only for male artists, while women and specifically feminist artists were encouraged to work in performance art and photobased media- Schor focused her studio practice on painting, insisting on bringing together a language-based conceptualism and political consciousness with the language of painting.
In recent works on paper and in oil on linen, Schor confronts mortality in the face of historical ambition and depicts the painter as a transformative link between nature, the body, and language. These recent works are self-portraits of the Woman Artist who is, in terms of art world fads, both “too young” and “not dead enough. ” These uncompromising, darkly funny and confrontational female “Power” Figures -half naked, half young, half dead, fielding questions and demands from the world and from ghosts presences of youthful alter-egos- are nevertheless painted and drawn on fragile tracing paper, creating a contradictory message about power and meaning in relation to feminist identity, female embodiment, and links between image, materiality, and language in a manner that is emblematic of her art practice going back to the 1970s.
For her contribution to RE-ACTION, Schor has chosen to respond directly to August Sanders' 1926 photograph, Painter (1926), side-stepping the previous responses in her drift, which in keeping with the medium of the Sanders' initiatory image and with contemporary trends towards the photographic, textual and cinematic, are themselves not paintings though they drift/riff off of a photograph of a man denoted as “Painter”. For the project, she has created a painting on paper of a woman painting with her whole body, a painting which can be shipped across international borders almost though not quite as easily as through the internet, in order to give a small example of the materiality and immediacy of a painting touched by a human hand, in this case the hand of a woman painter.
Mira Schor is a New York-based artist and writer. Her work has been included in exhibitions at The Jewish Museum (NY); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); MoMA/PS1(NY); Neuberger Museum (NY) and Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield). Interviews with Schor have appeared on Art21Blog; Bomblog; Hyperallergic; Artinfo and Culture Catch. She participated in ARTspace's Annual Distinguished Artists' Interviews at the 2013 Annual College Art Association Conference in New York. She is the author of A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (2009); Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (1997; both Duke University Press) and of the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. She is the co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.
Schor is the recipient of many prestigious awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting; a Pollock-Krasner Grant; College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism and Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is an Associate Teaching Professor in Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design. She is represented by Lyles and King Gallery (NY) and by CB1 Gallery (Los Angeles).
Mira Schor lives and works in NY (USA).