Mira Schor Artist talk and panel

The Courtauld welcomes the American artist Mira Schor (b. 1950, New York) on the occasion of her solo exhibition Wet/London at Mimosa House, London. Schor is one of the most significant and incisive feminist painters of the past fifty years. Her work emerges from the belief that painting remains a vital intellectual and political tool – a place where language takes material and visual bodily form, and the body becomes a site of inscription, resistance, and desire. At a moment when democratic institutions are under pressure, language is increasingly militarised, and questions of bodily autonomy are once again fiercely contested, Schor’s practice speaks with renewed urgency.

Despite Schor’s significance as an artist, writer and educator, her work has rarely been exhibited outside America. Wet/London is framed as both a historical corrective – addressing the lack of exposure to Schor’s work outside the States – and a political intervention, foregrounding feminist bodies of knowledge and visual languages urgently needed today.

The exhibition will comprise paintings, drawings and other paper works that span the breadth of Schor’s career from her time as a student at CalArts on the Feminist Art Programme in the 1970s to the present day. The exhibition is anchored by a new site-specific painting commissioned for Mimosa House’s six-metre fireplace wall. Responding to the scale and architectural symbolism of the hearth, the work reclaims a traditionally domestic site as a space of feminist inscription and public address. This commission underscores the exhibition’s urgency, asserting painting as an active, contemporary language rather than an historical form.

A presentation by Mira Schor will be followed by a series of panel responses and a roundtable discussion.

Organised by Professor Jo Applin FBA, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art and Director of the Centre for the Art of the Americas