Ann Leda Shapiro

In an artistic practice of nearly six decades, Ann Leda Shapiro entwines themes of life, death, gender, and body with sensitive meditations on the natural world. As an activist with Artists Against the War and a feminist art collective, Shapiro uses humor and symbols to express her response to political and social issues. She continues to explore unities and dualities that connect secular and spiritual disciplines, and link the human body to its environment and to one another. For Shapiro, who maintains an acupuncture clinic as well as an art studio, healing and artmaking inform each other and have become a unified practice. Ideas around interconnectivity are at the heart of Shapiro’s work, where she draws on frameworks from science, psychology, and spirituality. Her work is created through slow, meditative focus, and incorporates case studies, diagnostics, and x-ray vision as tools to investigate layers of meaning. By reconstructing the body with elements from nature, she reflects the exterior world through the interior body as landscape, and vice-versa.