A Conversation with my mother and Shulamith Firestone # 2, 2015
Laser cut baby-shaped forms, covered with Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. 12 pages. Edition of 3. 10.25 x 7 x .5 inches. $700
The Presence of Their Absence: The Portraits, 2013
Portfolio of 19 prints, slip sheeted with laser printed vellum, edition of 3, 14.25 x 9 x .75 inches. $2500
Plastic figure, dye, linen thread. Book created and figure lined with text from Atlas of Surgical Operations, 17 x 7 x 6.5 inches, inset book 5 x 3.5 x .5 inches.
Plastic figure, dye, linen thread. Book created and figure lined with text from Atlas of Surgical Operations. , 16 x 7 x 6.5 inches, inset book 4.5 x 2.5 x .5 inches.
Heart Control, 2008
Girdle, dye, acrylic glass vials, water, exacto blades, needles, thread, linen cord. Inset: heart-shaped book 4 x 4.5 x 1 inches, created from Atlas of Surgical Operations. 15 x 23 x 5.5 inches, Unique. $1200
Hands of Josephus is an altered book, created from a broken down copy of Flavius Josepus ‘Twenty books of The Jewish Antiquities, The Life of Josephus and the The Jewish Wars’. Each page, cut in the shape of hands is sewn on multiple beaded cords, then attached to wire hand forms, which are encrusted with beads. Josephus, a 1st century Jewish historian and apologist who survived and recorded the Destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. His works give an important insight into first-century Judaism, while raising questions about who owns history. The hand of the victor it seems, always controls the every version of truth. This is the first book, of five.
Hands of Josephus: Part 1, 2006
Altered text from Josephus: History of the Jews, beads, wire hand forms
Unique book in series of five. 10.5 x 15 x 4 inches. $2000
Digitally printed on Whatman Wove, binder board, linen cord, linen thread, laval and Asahi book cloth, silk dye. Text by Mary Florio, edition of 9, 7.25 x 3.75 x 2 inches. $1200
Hand-shaped, hand cut acid free paper, laser print, ink, sewn on hemp cords, edition of 5, 6.25 x 4.25 x 2 inches, $800
Statement
As an artist engaged with the book format, I work with a variety of non-traditional materials: fabric, clothing, found objects. I transfer, draw and stitch my texts. Using the language of clothing is the startin point for the books and objects I create.
Baby (Not) on Board: The Last Prejudice? addresses why so many people are angered by women who choose childlessness. The work is part of an ongoing exploration of our culture’s pejorative views about women without kids. Using red thread to create scarlet letters, I hand-embroidered representative negative comments on baby dresses. The statements taunt and accuse. Gathered from interviews with childless women, online research, and personal experience, the comments are typical of an endless flow of critical statements that seem to be growing bolder, even as non-traditional families are gaining greater acceptance.
Rules of Engagement, is a series of twenty hostess aprons. Each apron has transferred images idealized women, and is hand embroidered with quotes from Sun Tsu’s The Art of War, which I stumbled upon in an airport book store some years ago-aimed at business travelers. I thought, why not place Sun Tsu, and his strategies in a more domestic context.
Recently I have taken the entire series and put them together in a digitally printed book.
The Posioner’s Kiss was an installation, comprised of floating doll dresses, hanging in space, above a blanket of fallen leaves to create a forest of lost childhood. Each dress has quotes from classic fairy tales embroidered around its hem, and is printed with iconic images that reflect each quote. The quotes reflect the darker side of the tales, the anxiety of childhood and the fear of the unknown which color the unromaticized side of childhood. The background murals are made of the eyes of street children, who are the witnesses, unable to speak
Biography
Miriam Schaer, a Brooklyn-based multimedia book artist, uses garments to explore feminine, social, and spiritual issues. She is represented in numerous collections, including the Alan Chasanoff Book Arts Collection at the Yale Museum and Arts of the Book Collection at Yale’s Sterling Library; the Mata & Arthur Jaffe Collection: Book as Aesthetic Object at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Harvard University and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture, Duke University, Durham, NC.
Her work has earned a NYFA Artists Fellowship, inclusion in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum, and representation at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea. In 2007, she was an artist in residence for the Imagining the Book Biennale at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt.
Her series, Baby (Not) On Board: The Last Prejudice?, about society’s prejudice against women without children, was included in MAMA-Motherhood Around the Globe at The International Museum of Women, and was featured on Babble.com and the Huffington Post. Her interactive project What’s Your Baby? seeks to reframe the question why don’t you have children? in order to honor and respect everyone’s choices.
She is currently the Acting Director and a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary MFA Program in Book and Paper at Columbia College Chicago.
