Somewhere in Manhattan, sometime in the mid 1980s: a friend invited Ann Leda Shapiro to a clandestine gathering of nameless, faceless women at an artist’s loft. “Come to this meeting,” she was told. “We’re pissed off. We’re going to do something.” It turned out to be the beginning of the Guerrilla Girls.
Shapiro kept the secret of her involvement for 40 years; she will still only say so much. But there is one story about the time The Washington Post was sending people up to conduct a photoshoot. This posed a problem, as one of the primary commitments of the group was anonymity. Shapiro, taking notes for their meeting, was scribbling down ideas as fast as they came, when she committed a misspelling that would make art history: instead of guerrilla, she wrote gorilla. It was an a-ha moment, and their solution—the now-iconic gorilla mask—was born.
Shapiro’s journey through the art world is a storied one, her intersection with the Guerilla Girls just one of many tantalizing threads that could be spun into a volume. As she (selectively) spills the lore, our conversation is lubricated by multiple cups of coffee served in the artist’s Vashon Island living room. It’s a well-loved and lived-in house just up the road from a rocky slip of beach. Sun glitters off the face of the water, flooding the space with dappled light that dances across the ceiling with each break in the clouds. An acupuncturist’s table—not an easel or drawing desk—takes primary place in the room.
She’s lived here for 30 years, tucked away from the limelight.
Like the majority of female artists who achieve renown, it’s only been later in life that she’s been getting her flowers. (Shapiro turns 80 this August, though age feels like a preposterous abstraction here; she moves and speaks with the vivacity of someone 80 going on 18.) Last spring her solo exhibit, Interconnected Worlds, debuted in Antwerp. Another solo, Body Is Landscape, is currently hanging in Hong Kong. This January, Shapiro received the Betty Bowen Award—one of the region’s most coveted—which comes with a hefty cash prize and an exhibition at Seattle Art Museum. (Hers is scheduled for 2027.)
Categorizing Shapiro’s work is no easy feat. Watercolor and gouache paintings with an energetic, illustrative quality that plumb the esoteric, autobiographical, cosmic cartographies of the body. The body is ever-present in her work. Bodies that serve as landscapes. Bodies that swim in celestial storms and electric seas. Bodies as fine as stardust. Bodies that turn into trees that turn into something much deeper and primal. Detail so minute it seems physically impossible. Humor that is by turns brash, vulnerable, and grotesque mingles with sacred rage throughout earlier work; later imagery unfolds labyrinthine (self)portraiture that could keep a psychoanalyst busy for years.
It’s the kind of work the world is hungry for now. But it wasn’t always like this.
Shapiro grew up a “red diaper baby,” the daughter of card-carrying, working-class Communist parents who lived in a housing project in Queens. They were “neglectful, but had fabulous values,” she notes. Shapiro’s mother encouraged her artistic tendencies (which included being allowed to paint on the walls). On Saturdays, they took the train into the city so Shapiro could take classes at the MoMA’s art school, where she learned to “paint with sponges and throw paint at paper.” When the family eventually relocated to Manhattan, they moved into an apartment directly across from the American Museum of Natural History—a proximity that contributed to the development of Shapiro’s approach to close observation of the natural world. There was never going to be any other way but art for Shapiro; in her free time after high school she haunted the museum across the street, filling sketchbooks with intricate drawings of its curiosities while inquisitive museum guards looked on.
After high school, Shapiro rented a walk-up on the Lower East Side—the kind with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet down the hall. She worked at a library, then an advertising agency (where, to assuage boredom, she typed out entire chapters of Moby Dick, one page at a time). She saved enough cash to catch a hippie bus to San Francisco, where she rented a room under a staircase and enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute. She modeled and painted murals for money. She marched with Allen Ginsberg and made low-tech, psychedelic oil-and-paint visuals for the first Kool-Aid Acid Test concert (Shapiro was perhaps the only person present not tripping on drugs).
She attended the University of California, Davis, for grad school, where the critiques were performed exclusively by mustached men. When they brought her to tears during her first review (her paintings were too “primitive,” they berated), Shapiro resolved to never let such a thing happen again. At the next review, she arrived with a rubber penis strapped to her face. She nearly asphyxiated (she forgot to poke holes in the tip), but the stunt was so off-putting it worked; from that day on, the mustaches kept mum and she earned an MFA without further incident.
After graduating, Shapiro traded oil paints for watercolors, scaling to a more intimate style that reflected the inspirations of her youth: Little Lulu comics and the delicate nature drawings of her museum sketchbooks. When a curator from the Whitney Museum of American Art paid Shapiro a studio visit, they offered her a solo show of works on paper—an honor for any artist, let alone a recent graduate. But when the exhibit opened in the fall of 1973, Shapiro was appalled to find they had pulled three of her best paintings at the last minute. “I was shocked,” she says. “I had no idea I was doing anything that was controversial.”
The censored works in question—three watercolors completed in 1971—seem disparate at first glance, but each is threaded with the same provocative humor as Shapiro’s rubber dick that doubled as a mask. One of the paintings, Two Sides of Self, depicts a pair of hermaphroditic mermaids whose bodies appear to conjoin at the breasts, lips, and (male) genitalia. The central figure in Woman Landing on Man in the Moon is a female astronaut in a NASA spacesuit; three American flag patches placed across the uniform reveal slits through which breasts and a penis protrude. Across the inky void in the background, a fleet of tiny airplanes skywrites: one needs a cock to get by.
“I was just asking questions innocently, like, what is male and what is female?” says Shapiro. “There was no multiplicity of pronouns then, or anything like that. I was asking, do you have to be male—or act like a male—to be able to move ahead in the world, to be visible?”
The Whitney wasn’t having it.
Happily, Two Sides of Self and Woman Landing on Man in the Moon were both eventually acquired by the Seattle Art Museum in 2015—part of the Deed of Gift spearheaded by artist Matthew Offenbacher and his partner Jennifer Nemhauser after he won the Neddy Artist Award. Offenbacher used around $20,000 of the award funds to purchase works by women and queer artists, which were then gifted to SAM as a gesture of solidarity to the community and an attempt to help rectify the dearth of work by minorities in the museum’s collection.
That would be far in the future, however.
Following the ’73 exhibit, Shapiro withdrew from the art world. She would continue to paint, but she would not be censored, nor self-censor. Going forward, she exhibited only in underground spaces and spent the next two decades as a self-described “academic vagabond woman.” She taught criticism and art at universities across the country. She spent a semester in a boat sailing the world. In her six years of undergrad and graduate school, Shapiro had never had a woman teacher, not once; while teaching, she found herself the sole woman in every department. The token female academic, with a strap-on cock for a nose.
Or a gorilla mask. It was around this time that Shapiro found herself amid a group of like-minded artists who were pissed. It was also around this time that a close friend was diagnosed with AIDS, an event that would indirectly shift the trajectory of her life. Shapiro took up volunteering at a clinic in Austin that treated people with the disease. The clinic happened to specialize in acupuncture.
“When I started reading about the theory and history and philosophy of Chinese medicine, it was like falling in love,” she says. The definition of qi is not merely energy, Shapiro explains: “It is matter on the verge of becoming. It’s that moment when you’re living and dying simultaneously. And that’s what I’m trying to paint about, the dichotomies—that things aren’t in opposition, but they’re in interconnectivity.”
Shapiro left her university job to study acupuncture in Seattle. Just for a year (she thought). She fell for the practice as much as the theory—and she was really good at it.
To say Shapiro’s work/life amounts to something approximating Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art, in which everything merges into a cohesive whole—is far from a stretch, as art and acupuncture melded on the island she made home. During this time she published multiple books, including a picture book about Vashon, My Island, and a graphic novel, Art Notes of an Acupuncturist. In the latter, she outlines a pictorial history of the synaesthetic cosmologies contained within the human body. With bursts of grotesque humor and poetic wit, Shapiro illustrates the interconnections at play in orifices and organs, tracing the invisible threads between elements and colors, emotions and smells. It reads like a legend to unlock the symbolism of her later work.
Because the demand for Shapiro’s art has increased, there’s less time for acupuncture lately; almost all her hours are committed to the studio, where she’s currently working on six pieces for her upcoming exhibit at SAM. As she leads the way into her workspace—a standalone building behind her house, where soft island light pours through skylights—she explains a piece she is working on, about the ginkgo trees she recently encountered in Japan. “They’re the oldest trees in existence, living fossils,” Shapiro muses. “They survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb.”
But, of course, it’s about more than just that. If you look closely, you can trace the nervous system of the universe in the wood and roots of those trees.