{"id":18551,"date":"2023-10-26T19:19:41","date_gmt":"2023-10-26T19:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=18551"},"modified":"2026-02-10T23:14:25","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T23:14:25","slug":"feminist-interview-project-mira-schor-in-conversation-with-charlotte-kent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=18551","title":{"rendered":"Feminist Interview Project: Mira Schor in Conversation with Charlotte Kent"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Feminist Interview Project<\/a>, organized by Katherine Guinness and Jocelyn Marshall on behalf of CA<\/a>A\u2019s Committee for Women in the Arts<\/a>, examines the practices of feminism by interviewing a range of scholars and artists, preserving oral histories while expanding the boundaries of what might be considered feminist. Throughout its interviews, this project reimagines the possibilities of feminist practice and feminist futures.

For our ongoing collaboration with Art Journal Open<\/em>, the Feminist Interview Project is excited to present artist and writer Mira Schor in conversation with Charlotte Kent, arts writer and Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University. The two met for a conversation over Zoom on March 9, 2021. This interview has been edited for clarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mira Schor with her paintings Strange Fruit<\/em>, 1988 and Dicks, or the Impregnation of the Universe<\/em>, 1988 (photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Charlotte Kent: <\/strong>Let\u2019s start in the context of your long history thinking about feminism and art, including your work with the feminist <\/a>a<\/a>rt program at CalArts<\/a>. When you joined, the program was in its first year. What made you think, \u201cI want to go across the country and do that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mira Schor: <\/strong>I had been an art history major at NYU, and I decided that I did not want to pursue art history. So that was the first decision. Then there’s a series of decisions that brought me to going to graduate school in art. And besides that, where was I going to go? So, I took a year off, during which I tried to develop a little bit more of a portfolio and apply to art schools. There were far fewer schools and programs at that time than there are now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had been discouraged by a family friend, the artist Jack Tworkov<\/a>, from applying to Yale. He had recently retired as the head of the School of Art there. I’m not sure he actually<\/em> said: \u201cGo West young woman!\u201d but that’s the way I understood the advice. I think he was afraid of two things\u2014I’ll never know for sure. One, he may have thought, well, she’s never going to get into Yale. Because the work I was doing was considered illustration and absolutely didn\u2019t fit the Yale aesthetic. And two, I think he might have felt charitable; that if I had been accepted to Yale and gone, I would have been destroyed by the kind of formalist macho art criticism that was in vogue then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I applied to wherever I could think of, and during that year my older sister, Naomi Schor, told me about CalArts via her friend Sheila de Bretteville,<\/a> whom I also knew. So, I applied there, even though at that time the school was only a few months old. I have the draft of a letter that I sent\u2014I kept all my handwritten drafts\u2014to Miriam Schapiro saying that I was applying to CalArts and I\u2019d heard there was going to be a feminist program, could she tell me more about it? I have her letter saying, \u201cWell, I’m going to be in New York because I have a show opening\u2014why don’t you come to the gallery and we’ll meet?\u201d I went and she and Paul Brach were there\u2014I didn’t know that they were married, but I knew he was the director of the School of Art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mira Schor, Goodbye CalArts!<\/em>, 1972 (work \u00a9 Mira Schor; image provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The irony is that I got into every school I applied to\u2014even the most conventional schools. But CalArts was the only one that made sense. That summer, Sheila sent me a copy of Everywoman<\/em>,1<\/a><\/sup> which was specifically about Judy Chicago’s feminist art program at Fresno. Meanwhile, my sister had joined a consciousness-raising group. One summer day\u2014in the summer of 1971\u2014my sister, my mother, Nancy Miller, Hester Eisenstein\u2014who were brilliant young feminist academics\u2014 and I had lunch; we talked about feminism until dinnertime. We never left the table. I was contesting it, partly to be contrary, because of my older sister\u2019s intense involvement, but also partly because I think every young woman has to pass a threshold to realize that there are limits on you, socially constructed limits, and it\u2019s like taking off rose-colored glasses. But I think I was pretty primed for feminism. That was a very important day. I registered to vote and marched on August 26, 1971\u2014it was the fifty-first anniversary of women getting the vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that time, formalism and symbology or iconography were the main subjects. I had no problem applying those ways of thinking about an artwork, but I had absolutely no interest in having it applied to my own work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

But the feminist program at CalArts was its own thing, it was a separatist program, so you studied only within it and you didn\u2019t work with other people. And when I got there, it was very intimidating and intense. But I don’t regret the decision to have been involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> You\u2019ve mentioned how CalArts was less conventional, and that appealed to you. Why do you think you were interested in taking what might be considered the harder, less conventional road?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS:<\/strong> I don’t think I took the harder road, I think I took the only road I could. I was not interested in a formalist art education\u2014in part because I knew a lot about art through my parents who were artists\u2014but even more because I had studied art history. At that time, formalism and symbology or iconography were the main subjects. I had no problem applying those ways of thinking about an artwork, but I had absolutely no interest in having it applied to my own work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My work was based on personal narrative, influenced by Surrealism, early Italian narrative painting, Northern Renaissance painting, all those influences. I was interested in my own narrative, so somebody saying, \u201cWell, you really should have put the blue over here,\u201d well, I’m sorry, that is not relevant to me. Besides, I\u2019d been working for Red Grooms and Mimi Gross<\/a>. I hung out in their studio. I helped Red Grooms<\/a> and Rudy Burckhardt<\/a> produce a stop motion animation; that was kind of unconventional already. I got a sense of a different art world, but it connected with the art world I’d been brought up in. It was really the first place that felt welcoming of what I did, and that sort of anticipated CalArts for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At CalArts, I didn’t have to take stuffy academic classes. I tell this to my students, because I think it’s funny, but I never had to submit my work to a critique. The only time I did was after we finished Womanhouse<\/em> [1972, a Los Angeles performance space and installation intitated by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and other women from the program at CalArts] and we returned to a slightly more conventional situation on campus. It was during that critique that I left the feminist program.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK<\/strong>: What happened?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS<\/strong>: I did a painting\u2014which was actually in a show I had a couple of years ago\u2014and it was about fear. I was twenty-one years old, I was still a virgin, at the time that was the biggest impediment of my life. It was a small gouache painting, and I don’t know what I said about it, but I didn\u2019t want a formalist criticism and I didn’t want to be attacked. Mimi Schapiro turned to me and said, \u201cDo you want to know what I think? It’s smug, rigid, and boring.” And then all my friends in the room, out of some kind of group thing, started agreeing, as if it was finally their chance to be critical to me. It was so ad feminem. Rather than bursting into tears, which might have been my response earlier. in my time in the program, I said, \u201cYou know, I’m expecting a phone call from New York. I have to leave.\u201d I walked out of the room, and I never came back. And I mean, I never came back to the program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I arrived at CalArts, I met a teacher, Stephan von Huene<\/a>, a wonderful sculptor who wanted to work with me. He had actually seen my work [during the admissions process] and responded to it\u2014it was amazing to me, to have someone at that level say, \u201cI want to work with that student.\u201d After I walked out, I went to him and told him he could be my mentor, which was the system there. After that, my work really flowered. It\u2019s when I started my story paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> Wow. I know how much the program meant to you. So even though you left it, it seems as if you carry it with you, to this day?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS:<\/strong> Oh, absolutely. I would say the decision to go to CalArts\u2014which meant leaving home for the first time, leaving New York, and leaving my mother to go to the only experimental art school in the country\u2014and the decision to be in the feminist program were the most important decisions I’ve ever made in my life. And the minute I left the feminist program, I became a representative of it in the school itself. I know that part of the reason all of this was able to happen for me was because I came from the art world, I could relate, and I could relate to the male teachers. Not just because I was young and pretty, but because I shared their basic understructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> Speaking of that previous connection to the art world, could you talk more about the influence your parents had on you? Particularly through their work and through the household?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS: <\/strong>Definitely. My father, Ilya Schor<\/a>, and my mother, Resia Schor<\/a>, were artists. They met in art school at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. It was a classical training, with figure drawing, printmaking, painting, composition; they were influenced by the School of Paris and the Cubists. My father came from Zloczow (now Zolochiv), which was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now in Ukraine. He went to Paris in 1937\u2014on the equivalent of a Fulbright Fellowship to go to France and Italy, although he didn\u2019t go to Italy because of Mussolini. My mother joined him in Paris in 1938. I think they hung out around some quite significant people\u2014go to the Caf\u00e9 Flore and see Picasso. My mother said he had eyes that burned through you; she was very pretty, so I’m sure he burned his eyes through her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father had apprenticed with a goldsmith engraver when he was younger, learning skills which I feel connect him to guild training from the Middle Ages on. While in Paris, he began to make little bits of jewelry that he could sell, and he made his first piece of Judaica\u2014a very complex and beautiful cup. It was in the Salon d’Automne, and his piece was singled out for mention in a review, which was rare for an outsider with no connections. Then my parents had the presence of mind and incredible luck to escape Paris, first for Marseille then America, to New York. They arrived four days before Pearl Harbor. My mother went to work in a tie-painting factory with a whole bunch of other people who all had advanced degrees in philosophy and stuff, but were all refugees learning English so that they could find work in their fields. My father started to work on paitnings, engravings, jewelry, and objects of Judaica. Because of the Holocaust, my father returned to his Hasidic past as a subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was very influenced by my parents working at home; my mother painted in the bedroom, my father had his own small studio room. I watched my father making things, watched my mother painting. They encouraged me. I went to a lot of galleries and museums. And then there was Jack Tworkov, who I was close with both before and after my father died, as a kind of alternate father figure. That led to a really strong lived awareness of what some of the issues were in that world at that time; namely the demonization of European aesthetics as being pretty and feminine and in opposition to the American school of thought. The Abstract Expressionists were so intent on creating their own identity\u2014big, brutal, real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When my father died, in 1961, my mother realized she couldn’t make a living out of painting, and sat down at my father’s work table, thinking maybe to finish some of his work. She took one class on soldering at the Y. That’s it. I’m wearing a ring that she made in 1964. And she gave it to me\u2014whenever she showed it to anyone I would tell her not to sell it, and finally she said, \u201cLook, I’m never going to sell it if you’re sitting there moaning. So here.\u201d She had really found her own style and direction bringing her previous painterly aesthetic into the more resistant, sculptural media of silver and gold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My teen years were involved with watching the development of her work, and I loved to watch her. She valued my opinions and she knew that I didn’t flatter people. I was a rude child, and when I edited Tworkov\u2019s writings, I found him saying I was incredibly<\/em> rude because I was outspoken. But my mother respected me because of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK: <\/strong>What you\u2019re describing is remarkable\u2014this mother encouraging your opinions as a disagreeable, outspoken adolescent. But your mother\u2019s work kept progressing. It became transgressive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS:<\/strong> My mother started to make jewelry because it was something she could sell. My father’s work in some way was rather feminine, at least in the way that the New York school would ascribe femininity to detail. My mother\u2019s work was more abstract and muscular; there was a physicality to it. There was a lesson in feminism through her work. When my father died, she had no family and only a life insurance policy of $10,000. Usually, a woman would remarry in order to support herself and her children, but she felt my father was irreplaceable, so she turned to her own work. And that is the feminist message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She started to make these hybrid works, which included metal\u2014brass and steel\u2014and geometric painting. They were like sandwiches of plexiglass, painting, and metal. In every mezuzah, there’s a text\u2014like a talismanic text\u2014which is not supposed to be seen or touched by any woman\u2019s hands. My mother would go to this Judaica store, buy these little mezuzahs. They are all identical, but each one is hand-done. She placed them in the front of her work so that you could see what is usually hidden from view, and then she began cutting them up, like a collage element. That was transgressive. And she knew that it was. She enjoyed it. She was definitely a protofeminist. Her actions influenced me, along with my father’s connection to a kind of mystical Hasidic tradition. This comes into play with reversibility\u2014that there was always another side\u2014it\u2019s a major practice in my work. Reversibility is a major theme and method. Almost everything I do has another side (which can sometimes be a problem in terms of exhibition).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mira Schor, Reversible Painting: Theory\/Visual Pleasure<\/em>, 2013 (work \u00a9 Mira Schor; image provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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CK: <\/strong>You have a deep relationship to materials. In your practice, you keep adopting new materials and new ways of using them.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS: <\/strong>That history of materials, again, comes from my parents. My father painted on cardboard\u2014the cardboard that came when he got his shirts back from the dry cleaners. My mother painted gouache on Arches paper. So, gouache was like the family medium. In my teens, I was working with gouache, ink, and paper. And that’s what I did when I got to CalArts. I very rarely ever tried oil painting, even though there was a lot of pressure on me to paint with oil, because gouache on paper was considered not high art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I got my first teaching job at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, then known for its connection to European art and conceptual art, Joseph Beuys came to visit. I didn\u2019t know about him until I got there, and he was like a god there. I never met him, but it was like a legend\u2014the legend of when Joseph Beuys came to Halifax. He was actually the speaker at graduation one year, and a lot of people in the audience, especially local Nova Scotia parents who had served in World War II, were not amused by a strange German guy who had been in the Luftwaffe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But about materials . . . after leaving CalArts I started using language in a more abstract way, somewhat influenced by Joan Snyder<\/a> and Pat Steir, who I was friends with, and then also Hanne Darboven, whose work I saw at Castelli Gallery in the early ’70s. I was also encountering a lot of experimental work at Halifax. There was something in the air that had to do with concept melded with process and materiality. I shifted to rice paper. The paper would become translucent, so I started to write on both sides of it. I began to make things<\/em>\u2014works that weren\u2019t really sculpture or painting. These works were very physical, and people would criticize me because the work looked like it had been aged since the medium gave it a burnished color. And I was using burnt umber, raw sienna, black dry pigment rubbed into the rice paper, some of which had a lot of fiber in it. The work began to grow in size. Some criticism came from questions of materiality: was I a painter or did I work on paper? At a certain point, I was ready to paint in oil on my own terms. And I began to look at all of the art that I had loved, not for what it represented, but for how it was painted. I always tell my students that you should feel as if you could make almost any artwork that you see, but that doesn’t mean you can or should. At first, working with oil, I was very nervous, and so I used media that would keep it in check in some way. Besides, the last group of gouaches I did were seventy-two inches high. I was really pushing it with dry pigment, pushing past its potential. It just can\u2019t go that big\u2014it\u2019s too expensive and not meant for that. Then I became crazy about oil painting\u2014really it was like a sexual passion. I mean, I would literally say, \u201cIf I could fuck it, I would,\u201d begging pardon to the College Art Association, I would! Materiality was and is extremely important to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK: <\/strong>There\u2019s a very visceral experience that many oil painters describe with that medium\u2014something about its tactility and the way you mix it with meaning. And yet, so much has been said against it, and how painting is dead. How can we recuperate painting, not only for artists, but also for its politics and especially its feminist politics? Could you talk about your own writing on painting?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS: <\/strong>The first thing that you’re pointing to is a chronological conjunction between the moment I started to make the decision that I was going to switch to oil and the beginning of my writing. In 1983, I saw a painting by David Salle, who I’d gone to school with. He had been a student of John Baldessari. We were back in New York around the same time. One painting called Autopsy<\/em> (1982) shows a scene of a woman sitting naked on a bed, wearing a dunce cap, alongside an abstract image in blue, white, and black. I just instantly could see, could understand that something had radically shifted from what had been before.  I knew David Salle had been at CalArts at a time when you could not ignore feminism. But that woman with the dunce cap . . . I just thought, \u201cOkay, I’m sorry.\u201d I started reading what was being written about David and every article asked, \u201cIs this work pornographic?\u201d They never<\/em> would say \u201cmisogynistic,\u201d just pornographic. He was taking photos of women for his paintings; he was creating porn for his paintings. So, I wrote an essay\u2014an essay nobody wanted to publish. I have a letter in my archive from Douglas Crimp because I had submitted the essay to October<\/em>. In the letter, he basically said, \u201cWe don’t like David Salle either. But the problem is not what he’s painting, but that he’s painting.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is to say: you have the moment of postmodernism, and that mainly concerns men, but it concerns women in the sense that women are being told to do something else, something other than painting. And that something else is not as valuable financially. This is why I started writing, starting with that essay on David Salle\u2014 \u201cAppropriate Sexuality\u201d2<\/a><\/sup>\u2014that I couldn\u2019t get published. And because of that, I joined a little artists and critics group that occasionally met to discuss recent exhibitions. In order to write, I read about the critique of painting. And if you read the critique of painting, you have to start reading some French theory. And of course, if you’re not in school, it’s not easy to do. I read some of the French feminists\u2014most notably Irigaray. My sister was an expert on Irigaray, and I also gravitated toward her writing. What she did with Speculum of the Other Woman<\/em> was fascinating\u2014piggybacking on Freud\u2019s writing and then twisting it against him. Her use of language was fascinating. That book and Male Fantasies<\/em> are among the two most important things I\u2019ve ever read. They\u2019re so valid to this day and should be required reading.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1980s into the early \u201990s, were very painful because in art, including painting, all the values and processes and ethos of honesty of the \u201970s had been turned upside down. There was a turn toward commodity culture, and the critique of commodity culture. The most painful was the demonization and critique of \u201970s American feminism as essentialist when feminism was meant to be anti-essentialist. There was something particularly painful about being considered essentialist as a feminist, but also painting was decentralized and somehow the two were melded together. So that’s where the essay \u201cFigure\/Ground\u201d comes in.4<\/a><\/sup> I was able to bring those two critiques into the same space to try to make a case that there was a hatred of fluidity in the critique of painting, which was also a gender critique of hatred or fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conceptuality, physicality, and visuality are so deeply embedded in my whole life. All the art I\u2019ve seen is physically in my body.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

CK: <\/strong>So often assumptions surrounding craft presume no reading or writing\u2014 just excellent making. It\u2019s a romantic view of the process, or completely ideological. In \u201cA Plague of Polemics\u201d you state if work becomes entirely ideological, it becomes a type of propaganda and it loses what you encourage artists to retain: their trust in the metaphoric capability of materials, forms and spatial interventions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can you talk about how you manage those things in your work, in your studio, when there’s so much political anger, especially in this moment? Even though \u201cPlague of Polemics\u201d was written in the early 1990s, it couldn’t possibly be more relevant now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS:<\/strong> Generally speaking, I think I truly am a Gemini. I really have a dual nature. Conceptuality, physicality, and visuality are so deeply embedded in my whole life. All the art I\u2019ve seen is physically in my body. I wrote recently that I remember going to Chartres Cathedral when I was eight years old. I feel that I remember the temperature of the wall in the little antichamber. It was the most transformative and important aesthetic experience; I was eight years old, but in a way, everything was already there, verticality, materiality, religion, color, you know, sort of transcendent color. And, around that time, I read a biography of Queen Elizabeth I where the author notes her beautiful handwriting\u2014that it was like birds\u2019 footprints. I\u2019ve never forgotten it. I gave a lecture a few years ago, which I never wrote up as text titled \u201cNegotiating the Antithetical.\u201d<\/a> I was interested in the critique of painting and I love painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> How do you push that agenda, for lack of a better word, forward?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS:<\/strong> Let\u2019s say in writing: Who do you reference? Who do you think is significant? To some extent my world has been a world of women\u2014women artists, primarily, as well as a supportive mother. In my book A Decade of Negative Thinking<\/em>,5<\/a><\/sup> I have a chapter called \u201cGeneration, 2.5\u201d about how I felt my generation between second and third wave had fallen out of history. There was interest in the feminist pantheon and then the door closed about 1978. That was it; feminist art had six or seven years. Miriam Schapiro was not a feminist artist until the time that I met her, she was an Abstract Expressionist artist. Judy Chicago was a Minimalist. We were all learning the same things at the same time. What I\u2019m trying to say is, I lived in a world where, of course, you reference if you talked about Carolee Schneemann, and you talked about Mary Kelly, and you worried about what so and so thought of Griselda Pollock (Old Mistresses <\/em>was such an important book).<\/em>6<\/a><\/sup> But, you live in the real world where the dominant male voices are always returning to the fore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> Do you find that you are still trying to cultivate those references by continuing to do readings so that there can be more references, and to keep seeing shows so that there continues to be more women in art who can be recognized? It\u2019s hard to break out of the greatest hits, or the canon, and so you\u2019re constantly having to figure out how to add. What I\u2019m asking is: Is going to shows and doing readings still a part of what you do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS: <\/strong> I do go to shows, I keep track of what\u2019s happening through Instagram, and in terms of reading, it\u2019s always been a catch-up because I\u2019m not doing it in school. I like to read books, I like to underline, so about four years ago, I began a ritual of getting a couple of books, go up to Provincetown\u2014I have an old oak tree in my back yard and I lie underneath it in an old broken lawn chair\u2014and I read a book, maybe I\u2019ll read two. I had always been selective in my reading but sadly now I also find it harder to read as much as I used to. The time suck and the format of social media has made it harder for me to concentrate but also perhaps I don\u2019t feel as much I did in the ’80s and ’90s that I had to study and read new texts in order to save my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the short answer is, yes, you have to keep up. And you have to keep reinforcing the influence and influential reality of women artists of all time periods. I think we’re in a strange moment, because there are many women artists, and there are many younger women artists, and their work is worth a lot more money than it used to be. And then there is the phenomenon, which goes in and out, of older women artists being resurrected\u2014when they get their retrospective and they\u2019re in a wheelchair. I\u2019m joking, but actually, I find it tragic. And I can see that it’s my fate. Also, I hope I’m not in a wheelchair. And now here, I\u2019m totally serious. And I want to find out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m friendly with Joan Semmel, and her career has picked up a lot. She\u2019s older than me, and she\u2019s continuing to keep her work alive with her experience, shifting imagery and brushstroke to express her sense of the female body in time and space as it ages, and just in the last few years her work has been purchased and shown, finally, at MoMA, for example. Joan and I had a conversation a couple of years ago where she said, \u201cYeah, this thing with older women artists, it could stop on a dime.\u201d And you know, I can see that happening because the art world has shifted. And you don’t always live to see that moment, or you may not have all your faculties. Mary Beth Edelson<\/a> and I got Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Women’s Caucus for the arts. Well, I was still young enough to enjoy it, but Mary Beth, to whom it would have meant a lot, is in a home, she couldn\u2019t be there, she didn’t know who she was. That’s cruel. It’s cruel that women would have to wait that long. Of course, some younger women under fifty have incredible careers.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One way I try to continue the ideas of Patrilineage<\/em>7<\/a><\/sup> is that I try to insinuate into press releases for my shows references to the influence of women artists because it is likely these references will end up in any reviews of my shows. I’m not so happy always with what’s written about my work, because I feel like I’m looking for Mira Schor to write about my work. One of the essays I’m proudest of is one I wrote about Ida Applebroog<\/a> for Artforum<\/em> in 1989.8<\/a><\/sup> And what I loved about Ida is that I when told her I had been asked to do it, she pretty much said, \u201cI’m not listening. I don’t want to know about it. Don’t tell me about it. Don’t raise my hopes, nothing!\u201d I never asked her anything. I just researched her, looked at her paintings, wrote the essay. And then she called me up and said, \u201cYou helped explain to me why I fell through the cracks.\u201d I’m waiting for somebody to kind of do the same thing for me. What Patrilineage <\/em>was really suggesting is that\u2014no matter the gender of the artist you are writing about\u2014if the influence of a woman artist is relevant, if it is there, you have to make sure to mention it. And the artist needs to bring that information into the discourse themself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK:<\/strong> You’ve mentioned so many women artists and writers who have been colleagues of yours and part of your own thinking across this process. But I was wondering if you might list for us some of the ones who are most present to you, or that you recommend to your students and the next generation. Those who you find yourself saying, you know, \u201cHey! That was really amazing!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS:<\/strong> Let me start with saying that since I didn’t see many women artists, except for my mother, in my earlier years, I later realized that I gravitated toward work that, in the history of art, were feminized in some way. Whether it was Northern Renaissance painting, or Paul Klee, or Surrealism, there was a connection to looking for femininity in the psychoanalytic sense. I was in the studios of Mimi Gross and Pat Steir growing up. There was Yvonne Jacquette, an artist whom I met before going to graduate school. Joan Snyder visited CalArts and helped me shift away from more representational work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, in the mid-1970s, I found a book\u2014I\u2019m going to start crying, the emotional importance of it is such that I cannot say the artist\u2019s name without crying\u2014I found a book about an artist who I\u2019d never heard of before called Charlotte Salomon.9<\/a><\/sup> It was remaindered in the bookstore in Provincetown. The fact that she depicted herself and her parents in her life, and that it was work on paper, that it included language, and of course, her Holocaust story, it was all so important. So, Charlotte Salomon: hugely, hugely important and influential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s influence and there’s resonance. Eva Hesse’s work is always a presence. Similarly, Elizabeth Murray, especially when I started to paint in oil. Ana Mendieta and Louise Bourgeois are key. I didn\u2019t know about Florine Stettheimer until after I was already doing work that related to hers in many ways,  but she\u2019s there and knowing her work made a difference. I saw Hanne Darboven<\/a> in the early \u201970s at Castelli Gallery, and she wasn’t writing things that made sense, but it was writing, script, on paper. I love Alice Neel\u2019s<\/a> work and Emily Carr\u2019s work. Then there are those that are not like my work at all, but probably are influenced by feminism in a similar way, like Adrian Piper’s Mystic Being<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My friends\u2019 work is part of me. My friend Maureen Connor<\/a>\u2014the work she did in the \u201990s was trying to deal with theory, with new materials and the critique of patriarchy. Ida Applebroog remains a model for me and an inspiration. And then there’s so many more of course; my friends\u2019 work is part of me. Susan Bee’s work is important to me, and my friend Susanna Heller10<\/a><\/sup> was a very good painter. It’s like family, their work is family. Hermine Ford<\/a>, the daughter of Jack Tworkov, who is absolutely doing the most outstanding work of her life. My friend Faith Wilding<\/a> is a really interesting visual and performance artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a huge matrilineage that I cannot imagine life without. I’ve lived in this alternate universe where all these people are incredibly important, you know, and they’re not just<\/em> incredibly important, they’re more important than many artists who were world famous. But they aren\u2019t known, not as known, and so you must constantly talk about them and write about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CK: <\/strong>Well, I think that was an extraordinary list. Thank you for that. Thank you for all the answers to these questions. And I hope you keep doing all the work that you’re doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MS:<\/strong> I hope I do, but it’s getting harder to do everything. I don’t write as much as I used to, because . . . I don’t know why really. I’m trying to focus on painting at this point, which is good. Now, I must get back to the studio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Mira Schor<\/a> <\/strong>is a New York-based artist and writer noted for her advocacy of painting in a post-medium visual culture and for her contributions to feminist art history. She is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture<\/em> and A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life, <\/em>andwas co-editor with fellow painter Susan Bee of the journal M\/E\/A\/N\/I\/N\/G <\/em>and M\/E\/A\/N\/I\/N\/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism. <\/em>Schor is the recipient of awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award as well as CAA’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism. Schor is represented by Lyles & King Gallery in New York and Marcelle Alix in Paris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte Kent <\/a><\/strong>is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University and an arts writer. Contributing to numerous culture magazines and academic journals, she is also an editor-at-large for The Brooklyn Rail <\/em>where she produces a monthly column on art and technology. She is co-editor with Katherine Guinness of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art<\/em> (forthcoming, Intellect Books). Kent is Scholar-in-Residence at NXT Museum where she co-curated with Jesse Damiani the first RealTime exhibit, Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div>
  1. Everywoman <\/em>Magazine, \u201cMiss Chicago and the California Girls,\u201d May 7, 1971. To read more about this issue from the perspective of Faith Wilding, see \u201cDon\u2019t Tell Anyone We Did It!\u201d<\/a> ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. Mira Schor, \u201cAppropriate Sexuality\u201d in M\/E\/A\/N\/I\/N\/G<\/em>: An Anthology of Artists\u2019 Writings, Theory, and Criticism, <\/em>Mira Schor and Susan Bee, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman <\/em>(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. Mira Schor, \u201cFigure\/Ground,\u201d in M\/E\/A\/N\/I\/N\/G<\/em>, 2000). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. Mira Schor, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology <\/em>(New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. Mira Schor, \u201cPatrilineage,\u201d in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture <\/em>by Mira Schor (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. Mira Schor, \u201cMedusa Redux: Ida Applebroog and the Spaces of Post-Modernity,\u201d<\/a>Artforum <\/em>(March 1990). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. For more on Charlotte Salomon see Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory <\/em>by Griselda Pollock (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. Susanna Heller died two months after this interview took place. Mira Schor wrote about the artist and friend in her review<\/a> of Susanna Heller\u2019s Beyond Pain, The Last Drawings <\/em>by Studio Dumas in The Brooklyn Rail<\/em>. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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