Miriam Schaer is a multimedia book artist. She uses garments — girdles, bustiers, brassieres, aprons, children’s clothes — as means of containment. Inside these stiffened, shaped, embellished enclosures, she places books and other objects that document her explorations of feminine, social, and spiritual issues. For the past twenty years, she has exhibited steadily and extensively in solo and group exhibitions, and her work has been mentioned in a long list of articles and reviews.
Ms. Schaer is a recipient of an Artists Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at Mabel Smith Douglass Library, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, the oldest and longest-running exhibition series dedicated to showcasing women artists in the United States, as well as at the Feminist Art Base in the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Ms. Schaer’s work has been shown in the Cheongju International Craft Biennale, South Korea, and in Imagining the Book Biennale at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt.
Miriam Schaer lectures and teaches books structures and printmaking at universities and art centers in the U.S. and abroad. She also runs teacher training and artist workshops, and taught in artist-in-the-school programs throughout the New York region. Venues in which she has taught and lectured include Sarah Lawrence College, Colorado College, and Rutger’s Center for Innovative Paper and Print, Memphis College of Art and Design; Facultad de Bellas Artes de Universidad de Castilla la Mancha in Cuenca, Spain; the Graphic Artists Union in Tallinn, Estonia; Cinema Rex in Belgrade, Yugoslavia; and the Center for Book Arts and the Lower East Side Printshop in New York City. She is currently a Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary MFA Program in Book and Paper at Columbia College Chicago.