Visions and Materialities Mira Schor
“To them, history was only an intimation. Things were like palimpsests, heaven the tangent at the circle of all experience. They were sure that everything hinted at something transcendent, that what was apparent to the mind is but a thin surface of the undisclosed, and they often preferred to gain a foothold on the brink of the deep even at the price of leaving the solid ground of the superficial.”
– Abraham Joshua Heschel, “A World of Palimpsests,” The Earth Is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe,[Farrar, Straus and Giroux], 1949.1
There I was, rushing to complete my workload as 2024 drew to a close. Hunched over a desk in an Airbnb on a summer morning in Salvador de Bahia, I found myself triangulating between the last executive tasks of the year and a batch of unread documents on Mira Schor’s lifetime of critical and artistic practice. A quick detour (let’s call it productive procrastination) into my half-read copy of Judith Shulevitz’s The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time² stopped me in my tracks. The passage I stumbled on spoke of sacred time as architecture – not built of stone and mortar but of ritual and attention. The Sabbath, Shulevitz suggests, is less a pause than a structure, a way of ordering collective experience against the ceaseless flow of secular time. There was my cue! This notion of time as something we build rather than merely inhabit echoes through Mira Schor’s unique artistic journey – her motifs of dresses, masks, and words cycling through decades, each return adding new rooms to her ever-expanding edifice of meaning. Her meticulous attention to temporality manifests even in her documentation practice – many of her works are marked with precise dates, not just the year but often the exact day, becoming temporal anchors in her artistic chronology. Each dated piece marks another moment in this architecture of time, though her oil paintings follow a different system, typically numbered and dated by year on their stretchers.
The setting for this exhibition feels predestined: An early 20th-century Adrien Blomme residence in Brussels’s Sablon district, where domestic intimacy still clings to the renovated rooms. The gallery’s townhouse architecture, with its sequence of chambers connected by archways, creates natural pauses between works – each space a discrete temporal zone where Schor’s pieces can settle into dialogue.
The blueprint for this approach might well have come from her childhood home, where her parents, Polish Jewish artists Ilya and Resia Schor, landed after fleeing Europe with nothing but their shared devotion to craft. During our recent Zoom conversation – one of those pandemic-era rituals that somehow persists – Mira conjured their New York apartment with cinematic precision: Every surface a testimony to artistic labor, her father’s engraving tools arranged with devotional care. After his death, these same tools passed to Resia’s hands, creating a palimpsest of family practice that echoes through Mira’s work today. Her pieces reward the nosy parker; their backs often more intriguing than their fronts, harboring secret chambers that whisper of her father’s mezuzahs.³
When Ilya died in 1961, Resia – then just 50 with two daughters to feed – performed what can only be called an act of artistic transmutation. She sat at his desk, armed with only rudimentary knowledge of his craft – she began by finishing a few fragments of his silverwork pieces but quickly developed her own radically different abstract style. Twelve-year-old Mira watched this metamorphosis, absorbing lessons about resilience that would later inform her own artistic shapeshifting. Today, she still inhabits that same apartment, her father’s tools linking her to his Warsaw apprenticeship and the Academy of Fine Arts where her parents’ story began.
At CalArts in the early 1970’s, where Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago were busy upending the art world’s patriarchal playbook, Schor began her own quiet revolution with diaristic representations of herself in the exotic California landscape. Her paper dresses of the mid-1970’s embodied the complex feminist consciousness of the era, deliberately playing with contradictions inherent in society’s concept of femininity. As Schor reflects, on the one hand they were exceptionally fragile presences, on the other hand the presence of these inscrutable fragile figures/art objects hanging in the space of the viewer was often seen as an aggressive act, their very fragility a challenge to the sensibilities of male viewers in particular – that was partly my goal but it was also what some male viewers shared with me. These pieces – which she conceived as both “dress” and ascending V-shapes – hover between vulnerability and flight, earthbound concerns and spiritual ascension. Later, as the sole female visual arts professor at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she hung these pieces “gonad to gonad” with viewers, transforming gallery spaces into charged fields of gender politics. Yet Schor approaches femininity with the analytical depth of an anthropologist: “I don’t do it out of femininity,” she notes, “but because I find femininity just as intriguing and elusive a notion as the next person.”
By the mid-1980’s, Schor had traded paper for paint, though the ghost of transparency haunted her new medium. Language, always her faithful companion, wove through everything – from dream fragments scrawled on mask layers to words that morphed into pure painterly rhythm. “Women were filled with language,” she declares in her book Wet⁴, not meaning the dismissive “chitter-chatter” of stereotype but rather a vast interior cosmos of “ideas, ambitions, and philosophy.” In Breast (1993), on view here, we see how she married body and text, using punctuation marks as both visual and linguistic elements. This approach reached its apex in War Frieze (1991 – 1994), where language flows between gendered body parts like a corporeal syntax. It’s a kind of artistic judo, using beauty to flip viewers into political awareness.
In 2015, an encounter with N’kisi figures – first in Berlin, then at the Met – opened another portal in Schor’s practice. These Central African power figures, bristling with nails and laden with sacred materials, collapse multiple histories into single objects. Their presence in Western museums raises ongoing questions about cultural heritage and restitution – a particularly resonant context in Brussels, where discussions about the future of colonial collections remain pressing. Schor’s subsequent “Power” figures channel this energy through her own feminist lens. In Power Figure #1: Are You A Feminist Artist? (2015) a skull-headed form bleeds and bares its breasts, as if answering the titular question with its own body.
Throughout the former residence, Schor’s works find their own rhythms, their intimate scale in natural harmony with these domestic spaces. The building’s preserved architectural details – Blomme’s measured proportions, eclectic fireplaces, and the original windows – provide an unexpectedly resonant framework for art that has always navigated between public statement and private meditation.
Her recent work continues to probe the intersection of personal and political trauma while maintaining a characteristic precision. In Trauma 4 (2022), on view here, she casts an ironic yet empathetic eye on our current moment’s preoccupation with trauma. The work emerged from her observation of young artists increasingly centering personal and political wounds in their practice – a trend that, as she notes, “bordered on the trite.” Yet her succession of pronouns – my, your, ours – transforms potential critique into something more nuanced, creating a dialogue between individual and collective experience.
Sitting with Shulevitz that morning in Brazil, I couldn’t have known how her thoughts on sacred time would illuminate my encounter with Schor’s work. In an art world perpetually chasing tomorrow’s next revelation, here was an artist building something else entirely – spaces of attention where multiple temporalities might coexist. This Brussels debut brings her practice full circle, landing in the Europe her parents fled – a homecoming in a different key, where memory becomes method and time bends but doesn’t break.
– Fernanda Brenner
[1] Mira Schor shared this quote. The passage appears in a book illustrated with wood engravings by her father, Ilya Schor.
[2] Judith Shulevitz, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time[Random House], 2010, explores the history and meaning of the Sabbath in modern life, examining its role as both a religious practice and a temporal structure.
[3] A mezuzah is a small case affixed to the doorframe of Jewish homes containing a piece of parchment (klaf) inscribed with specific Hebrew verses from the Torah. It serves both as a sign of Jewish identity and a reminder of faith and divine protection.
[4] Mira Schor, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture[Duke University Press], 1997, is a collection of essays that explores the intersection of painting, feminist theory, and contemporary art criticism.
Mira Schor is one of the foremost feminist painters of the past fifty years. Operating in the nexus of language, painting, and feminist theory, Schor has continually imbued formalism with political urgency, and reminded viewers that written discourse and physical form are inherently linked. Her work has included major periods in which gendered narrative and representation of the body have been featured; in other periods the focus of her work has been representation of language in drawing and painting. She draws on multiple sources of imagery and art historical reference to inform her paintings.
The central theme in recent work is the experience of living in a moment of incipient fascism, climate collapse, and accelerated time, set against the powerful pull of older notions of craft, and visual pleasure. Her imagery and surfaces are sometimes transgressive, yet often at the same time delicate, poetic, and private, embodying her richly dimensional thinking. Schor overlays imagery and language to reverse the elision of female agency, systems of power, control, and subversion. In today’s social climate of conservative backslide and the erasure of civil liberties, her legacy and current work are as important as ever.