2019 Catalogue Archive

In the early 1970s, Mira Schor was a graduate student in the inaugural class of CalArt’s Feminist Art Program, the highly influential, though short-lived, program led by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. Among the work she made at the time were self-portraits, gouache paintings of allegorical scenes of women and animals in fanciful landscapes, and small gouache images of shoes, seen here in this work from 1972. The shoes appear as stand-ins for characters or types of women, seen in their color, style, and background, and there is a diary-like quality to these works, as Schor dated them all with a specific day. One can also see these works as connected to feminist questioning of body-controlling style norms like heeled shoes, and the way a shoe might exist as a symbol for how a person moves through the world (ie: Philip Guston’s shoes). Schor is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the 2019 Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work is in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and Portland Art Museum, among others.