Mira Schor
Mira Schor
CV | Press | Exhibitions
Mira Schor is one of the foremost feminist painters of the past fifty years. Operating in the nexus of language, painting, and feminist theory, Schor has continually imbued formalism with political urgency, and reminded viewers that written discourse and physical form are inherently linked. Her work has included major periods in which gendered narrative and representation of the body have been featured; in other periods the focus of her work has been representation of language in drawing and painting. She draws on multiple sources of imagery and art historical reference to inform her paintings. The central theme in recent work is the experience of living in a moment of incipient fascism, climate collapse, and accelerated time, set against the powerful pull of older notions of craft, and visual pleasure. Her imagery and surfaces are sometimes transgressive, yet often at the same time delicate, poetic, and private, embodying her richly dimensional thinking. Schor overlays imagery and language to reverse the elision of female agency, systems of power, control, and subversion. In today’s social climate of conservative backslide and the erasure of civil liberties, her legacy and current work are as important as ever.
Mira Schor (b. 1950, New York) has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Mendes Wood DM, Brussels and a retrospective at Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut (LaM), Lille in 2026. In 2023-24 she had a solo exhibition at Bourse de Commerce - the Pinault Collection, Paris, FR and a solo exhibition, her fourth, at a Lyles & King, New York, US. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Centre Pompidou Metz, Metz, FR; Musée d'art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, Rochechouart, FR; The Jewish Museum, New York, US; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, US; MoMA P.S.1, New York, US; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, US; The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, US; Hauser & Wirth, New York, US; David Nolan, New York, US; PPOW, New York, US; Mendes Wood DM, São Paolo, BR; and many other institutions and galleries. 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. Schor is the recipient of many prestigious awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism, the Anonymous Was A Woman grant, and the Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Schor is represented by Lyles & King, New York and Marcelle Alix, Paris. She lives and works in New York, NY.