Anonymous was a Woman

1976

Miriam Schapiro’s collages, like those of Taiye Idahor, were created to make connections with women of the past and to rebalance conventional male-dominated narratives. A “femmage” (her term for a feminist collage), Anonymous was a Woman celebrates female textile artists. Its roughly cut lace, cotton, and mesh squares set into acrylic paint evoke patchwork quilts. Only in recent years have museums recognized quilts—made almost exclusively by women, whose names were often unrecorded—as art. In the late 1960s, Schapiro spurned a successful abstract-painting career to explore an oft-neglected corner of art history known as “craft” or, in many cases dismissively, as “women’s work.” Inverting the pejorative term “craft,” her collages put everyday women’s creativity in a place of honor, the museum.