Anonymous was a Woman VI 1977

Miriam Schapiro made this print, Anonymous was a Woman VI, and it's like she's thinking about women's work, women's art, women's history. I imagine her in her studio, maybe surrounded by textiles, thinking about her grandma, or some other woman making doilies, maybe even her own first attempts at knitting. On the left, there’s a dark, inky doily, dense and heavy, and on the right, its ghost, faint and pale. It’s like a memory, or a suggestion. The dark doily almost has a weight to it, like she’s making something soft into something solid. That doily almost looks like a tear, you know? Like it could be a negative space, a gap in what we know about art history. Schapiro is like a DJ here, sampling and remixing things to make a point. She's in conversation with all the artists who came before, the known ones and the anonymous ones, building a language all her own. It’s a reminder that art is always a dialogue, a call and response across time.