Joel Shapiro

Joel Shapiro (b. 1941) received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from New York University (1961-1969). He had his first one-person museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1976, and was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial Exhibition (1981), Documenta (1982), and the Carnegie Museum of Art’s International (1988).

In the 1990s Shapiro completed a number of monumentally-scaled public sculpture, including a commission for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. In the early 1970s Shapiro began making sculptures that extended the stylistic ideals and the conceptual ideals of minimalism, but by the mid 1970s began to develop the planar, largely geometric figurative and architectural references for which he is best known. Shapiro’s oeuvre also consists of a significant production of drawings and prints. He has printed with numerous ateliers, including Simca Press, Grenfell Press, and Aldo Crommelynk. Invited to print at ULAE in 1985, he produced a series of three different but closely related woodcuts. Described by ULAE as “wood collage prints,” they incorporate the wood trim of a doll house, inked and printed, to create the print’s