Mira Schor is an American artist, author, editor, and educator. She is known for her criticism of the position of painting in contemporary art and for her contributions to feminist art history.
The main topics of her paintings are nature, body and language, and Schor represents a painter as the element that unites all these subjects together.
Background
Ethnicity:
Mira Schor’s Polish-born parents came to the United States in 1941.
Mira Schor was born on June 1, 1950, in New York City, New York, United States. She is a daughter of Ilya Schor and Resia Schor (maiden name Ainstein).
Mira’s elder sister Naomi Schor is a famous literary critic and theorist of French Literature and Feminist theory.
Education
Mira Schor studied at the Lycée Français de New York (The French High School of New York) in New York City where she received her baccalauréat in 1967. Then, she pursued her education at New York University where she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in art history three years later.
From 1972 to 1973, Mira Schor followed the courses at the California Institute of the Arts which provided her with a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting. While there, the artist took part in the Feminist Art Program’s famous project called Womanhouse and got acquainted with a sculptor Stephan Von Huene.
Career
Mira Schor’s career is associated both with books and painting. However, she has always considered herself as a painter.
The artist began her professional journey in the 1970s when she created dimensional works on paper. Since the 1980s, she has concentrated on the small oil paintings which celebrated the objectness of the stretched canvas and the solidity of paint itself. From 1974 to 1978, Schor served as an assistant professor at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University in Halifax, Canada.
Five years later, Mira Schor joined the staff of the State University of New York where she had taught for three years. Then, she worked as a co-editor of an art publication M/E/A/N/I/N/G: Contemporary Art Issues and M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online till 1996. During this period, 20 issues of the periodical were published. In 1989, the artist joined the staff of Parsons School of Design as an educator.
Schor pursued her educational path throughout the next decade at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville where she taught from 1991 to 1994. A year later, Schor held the courses at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. As to her artistic activity of the time, she focused on painting that reflected the combination of language-based conceptualism and political perception with the language of painting. The works of the period were demonstrated at solo shows at the Edward Thorp Gallery, Horodner Romley Gallery, and at the group exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum, the Armand Hammer Museum, The Neuberger Museum, and the Aldrich Museum.
From 1999 to 2000, Schor taught at Rhode Island School of Design.
As an art critic and writer, Mira Schor has authored a couple of books titled ‘Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture’ and ‘A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life’.
In 2013, the artist took part at ARTspace's Annual Distinguished Artists' Interviews at the Annual College Art Association Conference in New York City.
Nowadays, the artist is an Associate Teaching Professor in the MFA Fine Arts Program at Parsons The New School For Design. She continues to exhibit her artworks across the United States. The representative of her art is Lyles & King Gallery in New York City.
Views
Quotations:
"I will not give up the critical and intellectual or the visual and intuitive, so I see that the task ahead is to continue to insist that both ways of being as an artist can and even must exist in the same works and in the same practice. So, like Persephone, I do live in two worlds."
Membership
Mira Schor is a member of the College Art Association and the National Academy of Design. Since 1993, she has been a member of the Advisory board of the Provincetown Arts Press. Since 1994, Schor has also served in visual arts committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"An intimist whose candor is akin to Emily Dickinson’s." Robert Berlind, painter and critic
"Ms. Schor hardly tells the whole story of creative labor, but she lays out its essential elements: the isolation, reading, thinking and percolation that enable a Voice to emerge. At once poetic, lyrical and oddly real, her paintings give rare and sardonic visual form to the life, and the work, of the mind." Roberta Smith, art critic