Miriam Schaer

Miriam holds a doll with embroidery on its gown up to her chest and looks out askance

Bio

Miriam Schaer is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist who uses books, garments, photography, installation and collage to explore feminine, social and spiritual issues. She is represented in numerous collections, including the Alan Chasanoff Book Arts Collection at the Yale Museum, the Arts of the Book Collection at Yale’s Sterling Library, the Mata & Arthur Jaffe Collection: Book as Aesthetic Object at Florida Atlantic University, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Harvard University, the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture at Duke University, and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

Miriam Schaer’s work includes artist books, photography, installation as well textiles, felt and embroidery, in relationship to artist books. Her projects, Crafting Women’s Stories: Lives in Georgian Felt and Craft Power: Enhancing Women’s Rights Through Traditional Practices in the Republic of Georgia, with colleagues Clifton Meador and Melissa Potter, earned Soros Foundation funding were realized in the Republic of Georgia in 2013.

Her work has earned a NYFA Artists Fellowship, inclusion in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum, representation at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea and was an artist in residence for the Imagining the Book Biennale at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. She was a Fulbright Fellow in the Republic of Georgia in March 2017.

Her series, Baby (Not) On Board: The Last Prejudice?, about societal prejudice against women without children, was included in MAMA-Motherhood Around the Globe at the International Museum of Women, and featured on Babble.com and the Huffington Post. Schaer’s artist book, The Presence of Their Absence, incorporates her photographs, research and writing on the topic of childlessness. Her interactive project What’s Your Baby? re-frames the question of why some people don’t have children to honor and respect everyone’s choices.

Miriam Schaer is a an independent artist and educator. Formerly a Senior Lecturer in the Art+Art History Department at Columbia College Chicago, she also taught Art of the Book at the Pratt Institute, and served as a visiting artist at numerous institutions, including Sarah Lawrence College, Marshall University, and Colorado College.

For a selected account of Schaer’s professional experience including her exhibitions, presentations, and teaching history, click here to download Schaer’s Selected Curiculum Vitae. Please contact her for her full academic CV or a pdf catalog of available works.

She is represented by the Central Booking Art Space and Vamp and Tramp Booksellers, and serves on the Board of Directors of The Center for Book Arts in New York.