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Joel Shapiro

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This article is about a United States sculptor. For the mathematician of the same name, see Joel Shapiro (mathematician).

Joel Shapiro
Shapiro, c. 1973
Born(1941-09-27)September 27, 1941
New York City, U.S.
DiedJune 14, 2025(2025-06-14) (aged 83)
New York City, U.S.
OccupationSculptor
Organizations
Known forLoss and Regeneration
Spouses
Amy Snider
​
(sep. 1972)​
​
(m. 1978)​
Children1

Joel Elias Shapiro (September 27, 1941 – June 14, 2025) was an American sculptor.[1] Classified by art critics as a Postminimalist, his works consisted of sculptures composed of simple rectangular shapes. His sculptures were mostly defined through the materials used, without allusions to subjects outside of the works.[2] His works are in major collections and public spaces in the United Space and abroad. Most of his creations are named Untitled. His 1993 Loss and Regeneration was created for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.[3]

Life and career

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Early life and education

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Shapiro was born on September 27, 1941,[4][5] in New York City[6] and grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, New York.[5][7] His father, Joseph Shapiro,[6] was a physician who had an office in the basement of their house,[5] and his mother, Anna née Lewis, was a microbiologist;[6] both had studied at New York University.[5] He grew up with a sister, Joan.[4] His mother was a hobby artist who made clay figures. Growing up, he felt a love of art but a call to follow his father in medicine.[6]

Shapiro graduated from Bayside High School in Bayside, New York in 1959, at which time the school’s yearbook awarded him the title of Man About Town. He received a B.A. in 1964.[4] At age 22, he lived in India for two years while in the Peace Corps.[7][8] He said about the time: it "heightened my sense of the hugeness and variety of life in general, but also, the possibility of actually becoming an artist became very real to me for the first time".[4] He received an M.A. in 1969 from New York University.[7]

Career

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Shapiro worked at the Jewish Museum, helping with exhibition installation and polishing silver objects of the collection. In 1969, he was featured in an exhibition of the Whitney Museum titled Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, which formalized the Post-Minimalist art movement.[4] He had his first solo exhibition in 1970 at the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo.[6] There, he also showed tiny houses and chairs in cast iron and bronze, commenting in 2007: "I think they insisted on their own obdurate sense of self, in spite of the space surrounding but at the same time they're a part of it". The small objects surprised on the background of the "monumentality of Minimalism", and the forms compared to the mostly abstract sculpture at the time.[4] Shapiro's works were exhibited in the first exhibition of the Clocktower Gallery in 1973, which became the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.[4]

A retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum in 1982. In 1992, Shapiro moved to the Pace Gallery. He had many solo exhibitions, in New York City, the United States and abroad.[6]

Personal life and death

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Shapiro lived and worked in New York City. Around the time of his first exhibition, he married the art educator Amy Snider, who founded a department for education in art and design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. The couple had a daughter, Ivy, who became an art adviser. They separated in 1972, and Amy died in 2019.[6] Shapiro married the artist Ellen Phelan in 1978.[4][6] They lived in Long Island City where they had a spacious studio[7] in a former electric substation.[6]

Shapiro died of acute myeloid leukemia at a hospital in Manhattan, New York City, on June 14, 2025, at the age of 83.[6][9]

Work and inspiration

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Untitled, bronze, 1990, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Untitled, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

While in India serving in the Peace Corps, Shapiro saw many Indian art works; he experienced art in India as "pervasive and integral to the society", and he added: "the struggle in my work to find a structure that reflects real psychological states may well use Indian sculpture as a model".[7] His early work, which also drew inspiration from Greek art,[10] is characterized by some by its small size, but Shapiro has discounted this perception, describing his early works as "all about scale and the small size was an aspect of their scale". He described scale as "a very active thing that's changing and altering as time unfolds, consciously or unconsciously," and, "a relationship of size and an experience. You can have something small that has big scale." He said that in these works he was trying "to describe an emotional state, my own longing or desire". He also said that during this early period he was interested in the strategies of artists Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd.[7]

By the 1980s, Shapiro began to explore larger and life-size forms in pieces that were still reminiscent of Indian and Greek sculpture but also inspired by early modernist works by Edgar Degas and Constantin Brâncusi.[10] The bulk of these pieces have been commissioned or acquired by museums and galleries. Later, Shapiro further expanded his repertoire by creating pieces that depicted the dynamism of human form. For instance, his subjects were portrayed in the act of dancing, crouching, and falling, among others that explored the themes of balance, cantilever, projection, and compression.[10] His later works can have the appearance of flying, being impossibly suspended in space, and/or defying gravity. He said about this shift in his work that "[he] wanted to make work that stood on its own, and wasn't limited by architecture and by the ground and the wall and right angles."[7] These can be demonstrated in the case of the large-size outdoor art he made for the Hood Museum of Art. The bronze piece was an attenuated form that leans over a walkway and its near-falling form is viewed as an energizing element in the museum's courtyard. This sculpture, like all of Shapiro's mature works, are untitled.[11]

Shapiro was Jewish, and Jewish traditions have influenced his art works, including his frequent use of the color blue.[12] Shapiro's work has on occasion been compared to that of Alberto Giacometti, one of his favorite sculptors.[6]

Most of Shapiro's works received no name and go by the title Untitled. The artist explained: "I'm not much of a poet. Form is its own language."[4]

Works in collections

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Loss and Regeneration, 1993, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Shapiro's works in collections include:[13]

United States

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California

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District of Columbia

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Florida

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Illinois

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  • Untitled, 1984, Elliott, Gerald S., Chicago
  • Untitled (Arching Figure), 1985, Elliott, Gerald S.
  • Untitled (for G.S.E.), 1987, Elliott, Gerald S.
  • Untitled, 1981, Governors State University, University Park

Indiana

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Iowa

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Maine

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Maryland

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Massachusetts

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Michigan

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Minnesota

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Missouri

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Nebraska

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New York

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North Carolina

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Ohio

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Pennsylvania

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  • Untitled maquette, 1984, CIGNA Museum and Art Collection, Philadelphia
  • Untitled, 1984, CIGNA Museum and Art Collection

Texas

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Washington

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Wisconsin

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International collections

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Source:[20]

Australia

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Canada

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  • Conjunction, 1999, Embassy of the United States of America, Ottawa[22][23]

Denmark

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Germany

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Israel

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Italy

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Netherlands

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  • Untitled, 1999, Westersingel sculpture trail, Rotterdam[28]

Sweden

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United Kingdom

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Awards

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Shapiro became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1994, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998, and of the National Academy of Design in 2012.[32]

His other awards included:

References

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  1. ^ Art News obituary
  2. ^ Sale, Teel; Betti, Claudia (2008). Drawing: A Contemporary Approach. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. p. 25. ISBN 9780495094913.
  3. ^ Dawson, Jessica (February 5, 2006). "ART". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i Greenberger, Alex (June 15, 2025). "Joel Shapiro, Post-Minimalist Sculptor with a Keen Sense for Scale, Dies at 83". Art News.
  5. ^ a b c d Bui, Phong (November 2007). "Joel Shapiro with Phong Bui". The Brooklyn Rail (interview). Archived from the original on February 10, 2012. Retrieved May 15, 2012.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Solomon, Deborah (June 15, 2025). "Joel Shapiro, Celebrated Post-Minimalist Sculptor, Dies at 83". The New York Times. Retrieved June 15, 2025.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g Klein, Michele Gerber Joel Shapiro Archived November 12, 2011, at the Wayback Machine BOMB Magazine Fall 2009, Retrieved July 25, 2011
  8. ^ "Notable Former Volunteers / Arts and Literature". Peace Corps. Archived from the original on December 10, 2006.
  9. ^ "Remembering Joel Shapiro 1941–2025". Pace Gallery. June 15, 2025. Retrieved June 17, 2025.
  10. ^ a b c Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. 2009. p. 117. ISBN 9781584657866.
  11. ^ Kostelanetz, Richard (2001). A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. New York: Routledge. p. 565. ISBN 0415937647.
  12. ^ "Artist Joel Shapiro Discusses the Art in Mishkan HaNefesh". Central Conference of American Rabbis. June 22, 2015. Retrieved June 4, 2023.
  13. ^ "Joel Shapiro". Smithsonian Institution Research Information System. Retrieved June 17, 2025.
  14. ^ "Joel Shapiro : Untitled 1975". Nasher Sculpture Center. 2025. Archived from the original on February 25, 2016. Retrieved February 18, 2016.
  15. ^ "Joel Shapiro : Untitled 1984". Nasher Sculpture Center. 2025.
  16. ^ "Joel Shapiro : Untitled 1985–87". Nasher Sculpture Center. 2025.
  17. ^ "Joel Shapiro : Untitled 1986". Nasher Sculpture Center. 2025.
  18. ^ "Joel Shapiro : Untitled 1986". Nasher Sculpture Center. 2025.
  19. ^ "Joel Shapiro : Untitled 1996–99". Nasher Sculpture Center. 2025.
  20. ^ "Shapiro" (PDF). Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  21. ^ "Joel Shapiro - Untitled (chair) - Search the Collection, National Gallery of Australia". National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  22. ^ Heritage, Canadian (September 27, 2017). "Conjunction". Canada.ca. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  23. ^ Arnold, David (September 12, 2021). "Metaphors for Thought". National Peace Corps Association. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  24. ^ "Louisiana Museum of Modern Art". The Collins Family on the Web. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  25. ^ "Zwei Figuren, 1994 / Joel Shapiro". Bildhauerei in Berlin (in German). Archived from the original on September 24, 2005.
  26. ^ "Joel Shapiro". Skulpturen Park Köln (in German). Archived from the original on September 25, 2023.
  27. ^ "Work of art". Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  28. ^ "Untitled". Sculpture International Rotterdam. August 15, 2024. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  29. ^ a b "Works – Joel Shapiro – Artists – Moderna Museet". Moderna Museet. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  30. ^ "'Untitled', Joel Shapiro, 1978". Tate. April 7, 2022. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  31. ^ "'Untitled', Joel Shapiro, 1984". Tate. January 12, 2022. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  32. ^ "S / National Academicians. / Living Academicians". National Academy of Design. Archived from the original on March 20, 2016.
  33. ^ "Annual Report, 1975" (PDF). National Endowment for the Arts. 1974. p. 104. Archived from the original on June 18, 2009.
  34. ^ "Brandeis Creative Arts Award and Medal / Past Recipients". www.brandeis.edu. Brandeis University. Archived from the original on March 2, 2022. Retrieved June 21, 2025.
  35. ^ "Awards Dinner History". Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.
  36. ^ "CURRENT RECIPIENTS". International Sculpture Center. 2025. Retrieved June 21, 2025.

Further reading

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Joel Shapiro.
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