Children of Paradise

Schapiro was a pioneer of feminist art in the early 1970s—co-founding the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971. She was also a central figure in the Pattern and Decoration movement. This collage—or “femmage,” as she called it—exemplifies Schapiro’s revival of craft forms long disparaged as feminine and decorative. She commented, “I wanted to validate the traditional activities of women, to connect myself to the unknown woman artist who... made quilts, who had done the invisible ‘women’s work’ of Civilization.”