The Art Perspective: Karen Shaw

The Art Perspective: Karen Shaw

The Art Perspective provides a visual and audio forum for artists to exhibit their art and present exciting responses to major themes of our day. This edition on Girls, Women & Sports highlights the work of Karen Shaw, a New York-based artist exploring her feminist reactions to what she sees as the male-dominated world of sports. Click on “Play” to view the art and hear audio descriptions by Karen Shaw about her work. I welcome feedback from online viewers: email to [email protected]

Karen Shaw uses images and materials from pop-culture to address the sexism prevalent in the sports arena. Working in two and three dimensions, she invokes her “power” as an artist to feminize the macho wardrobe of the male athlete. The finished product is a mixture of masculine and feminine fashion that transcends typical gender boundaries.

Through her work, Shaw uses humor and passion to express her desire to see more girls and women represented in sports, and given the respect and celebration they deserve.

Shaw has been showing her work professionally for more than 35 years, including solo and group exhibitions in Paris, Germany, Switzerland and Guatemala, as well as across the United States. In New York, she has shown with Pavel Zoubok Gallery and Fredrieke Taylor Gallery.

Shaw has been awarded an NEA artist fellowship and an individual artist’s grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and received residency grants in the south of France at the Karolyi Foundation. Her work is included in several museum collections including the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University in Ithaca NY and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, as well as the Vera List Gallery of the New School and the Portland Museum of Art in Portland Oregon.

She has taught drawing and painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and has twice been a visiting artist at Princeton University in New Jersey. For the past 37 years, she has been the senior curator at the Islip Art Museum and Carriage House, East Islip, NY.

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Merle Hoffman's Choices: A Post-Roe Abortion Rights Manifesto

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“Merle Hoffman has always known that in a democracy, we each have decision-making power over the fate of our own bodies. She is a national hero for us all.” ​—Gloria Steinem

In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe V. Wade and a country divided, a pioneer in the pro-choice movement and women’s healthcare offers an unapologetic and authoritative take on abortion—“the front line and the bottom line of women’s freedom and liberty.”

Merle Hoffman has been at the forefront of the reproductive freedom movement since the 1970s. Three years before the Supreme Court legalized abortion through Roe v. Wade, she helped to establish one of the United States’ first abortion centers in Flushing, Queens, and later went on to found Choices, one of the nation’s largest and most comprehensive women’s medical facilities. For the last five decades, Hoffman has been a steadfast warrior and fierce advocate for every woman’s right to choose when and whether or not to be a mother.