FROST FINE ART

DAN SHAPIRO

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. 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, frequently as visiting artists or lecturers. These included Martha Graham, Buckminster Fuller, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Richard Neutra, and many others. After a brief period teaching at Columbia University, Shapiro moved to California in 1959 where he taught at UC Davis for the remainder of his career.

The newly-created art department at UC Davis in the 1960s was fertile ground for innovative and adventurous ideas, and included in the faculty Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, William Wiley, Roy DeForest and Manuel Neri. Shapiro exhibited widely in the 1960s, often in the company of his fellow UC Davis faculty members, and also had solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1967 and at Rice University, Houston, in 1968. More recently, solo shows have been held at Bennington College and Bennington Museum of Art in 2015, and Shapiro's work will be included with those of his fellow first generation faculty members at the inaugural exhibition of the new museum at UC Davis, The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, in November 2016. Dan Shapiro died in 1982.