Dee Shapiro

Long Island, NY

BIO

Born in Brooklyn and currently living and working on Long Island, Dee began exhibiting work in the 1970’s at the first women’s cooperative gallery on Long Island. In 2000 she took notice of the geometry of familiar places walking the city and traveling to the country and abroad and painted small horizontal cities and landscapes. Her recent works consist of patterns: patterns in nature, craft and work associated with women. The addition of collages is seen in most current work.

Dee Shapiro, raised in Brooklyn, received a Bachelor and Masters degree at Queens College is a practicing artist and writer and has exhibited widely in New York and abroad since the late seventies. Her work is included in several museums, universities, corporate and private collections around the country including the Solomon R. Guggenheim the Everson Museum, Mint Museum, Albright-Knox Museum, Dartmouth Museum, Chrysler Museum. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Washington, D.C. Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. Her poetry and essays have been published in magazines, journals and small presses such as Heresies, Chiron Review, Black Bear Review. Reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, Arts Magazine, ARTNews, Art New England and Confrontation. Grants included the Cow Parade New York and Wolf Kahn Foundation for curatorial work. She has worked as a gallery director, curator, stylist, editor and photo editor and currently teaches studio art and art history at SUNY, Empire State College.

You’ll love Dee if: you Like to imagine the city in a whimsical geometrical vision.

As in a dream of alternative realities, absurd connections, or on a trip passing familiar landscapes in unfamiliar settings, new conscious and unconscious associations are brought to a 2-dimensional surface in my work. In the recent pieces, geometry (seen even in the structure of organic forms) directs composition: arbitrary drops of color undermine control and create shapes that succumb to the overwork of drawings, rendering obsessive intricacies and paint application building the forms.