Dan Shapiro was born in New York City in 1920. He studied at the Cooper Union Art School in the early 1940s, and at Columbia University from 1944-46 after military service in World War II.

From 1947-57 Shapiro taught at Bennington College in Vermont and, after a brief period teaching at Columbia University, he moved to California in 1959 where he taught at UC Davis for the remainder of his career.

Bennington was one of the first colleges to consider the visual and performing arts an equal part of the curriculum, and during the 1950s many of the major figures in the art world were involved with the college, usually as visiting artists or lecturers. These included Martha Graham, Buckminster Fuller, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Richard Neutra, and many others. Under the directorship of the painter Paul Feelely, Bennington College played an important role in the artistic development of Shapiro, and the works exhibited here, although painted a short while after he had left Vermont, show the effects of the changes occurring in painting at this time, as artists moved away from the dense, gestural work of Abstract Expressionism, and, in Shapiro's case, closer to a style of painterly Lyrical Abstraction.

Shapiro exhibited widely in the 1960s, often in the company of fellow UC Davis faculty members Robert Arneson, Wayne Thiebaud, William Wiley, Manuel Neri, Roy DeForest and others. He also had a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1967, and at Rice University, Houston, in 1968. Dan Shapiro died in 1982.

All of these works come from the artist's estate.
Please click HERE to see a more complete listing of the artist's exhibitions.