1. Mira Schor: In conversation
Mira Schor at the exhibition “Figures of Speech” at Lyles & King, New York, 2026
Excerpt from online article:
Like an open wound, ruddy-crimson paint leaks out of its thick impasto surface, carving out the word “flesh”. Pulsing with energy, colour springs from the ash black, like a volcanic eruption. It breaches the borders of the canvas, refusing to stay within the tight pictorial frame. Flesh (2017), one of the works on display in Mira Schor‘s first UK solo exhibition, WET/London, epitomises the artist’s unique, undefinable body of work.
An artist, writer and feminist, Schor has delivered a biting critique of the art canon for over fifty years. After graduating from CalArts with an MFA in painting in 1973, she began exalting the corporeality of her materials through amorphous, bodily compositions. Her visual language stands out in a medium traditionally dominated by men — from the haunting, veiled and masked visages of her 1977 and 2025 Masks series, which recall the psychosexual portraits of the late Carol Rama or Marlene Dumas’s bleeding watercolour apparitions, to the flat mise-en-scène of early works such as Graves (1973) and The Two Miras (1973), set in wild landscapes. Her incisions into the male-dominated discursive fabric extended to writing, too. Alongside her contributions to the CalArts Feminist Art Program, where she studied with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, in 1986, together with her friend and co-editor Susan Bee, she established her own magazine, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, publishing critical texts by voices cast out of the mainstream art press.
Daughter of Polish-Jewish refugees, Schor’s work carries extra political weight, intensified by the climate in the United States after 9/11 and since Trump’s inaugurations. She spills her incisive thoughts into her writing, including her blog, A Year of Positive Thinking and, more recently, on her Instagram, which offers survival strategies in a world set on division. Like Patti Smith’s Instagram account, it reminds us of the power of a single voice to effect positive change. Schor is, as such, a quiet force to be reckoned with. Straddling painting, academia and political activism for decades, she remains an enigma — a little like what Roland Barthes, writing on photography, once called a “message without a code”.
Flesh, 2017
© Mira Schor. Courtesy Isaac Lyles.
© Mira Schor. Courtesy Isaac Lyles.
Schor’s exhibition opens on 9 October 2026 at Mimosa House in London. Ahead of the opening, we spoke to the artist about her continual need to create, the importance of political activism within online communities, and the magical slipperiness between the pen and the paintbrush.
Maggie Kuzan: It’s almost thirty years since the publication of your work, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (1997). Why did you decide to revisit the word Wet and use it as the title of your London show?
Mira Schor: It was suggested by Mimosa House, and at first I thought it was an old premise, as I’d composed many of the essays before ’97. It references debates within feminist art that I don’t think are as relevant today, namely people saying “women shouldn’t paint; they should just do photography.” That was basically the ’80s in a nutshell. But then, I reflected that Wet is what carried my name across the ocean. I’ve spent maybe two or three days of my life in London, and I’ve never shown work here, so I decided on WET/London to shake things up a little and situate the work in a new place.
Posted on:
08/10/2026
Author:
Maggie Kuzan
