Vulnerable

Ann Leda Shapiro is an American artist living on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, Washington, U.S.A. Here she has been practising acupuncture for over 30 years while maintaining an art practice that intertwines painting, healing, and activism, surveying foundational interests such as environment, care, and the somatic and spiritual connections between humans and the natural world.

Surrounded by forests, Shapiro finds inspiration in trees, focusing on their renewal and resilience. Her healing work informs her art, and her art informs her healing work. As pointed out by Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (in the press release ahead of Shapiro’s 2025 solo exhibition Interconnected Worlds: ‘Shapiro’s works serve as portals into a richly layered universe where personal and collective histories intertwine. Through luminous colours and symbolic imagery, she invites us to reflect on the interwoven forces of nature, the human body, and the subconscious mind—a space where art and healing merge.’

Her paintings, rendered in delicate watercolours, have always been highly topical, dealing with contemporary issues. In the 1970s, for example, Shapiro’s feminist art critiqued gender imbalances in the art world whilst also challenging conventional ideas about gender and identity in iconic works like Two Sides (1971, watercolour on paper, 50.8 x 35.6 cm, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.) and Woman Landing on Man in the Moon (1971, watercolour on paper, 50.8 x 36.5 cm, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.).

After studying holistic medicine (having become a certified acupuncturist in 1991) and relocating to a remote island, Shapiro then started producing works within a framework of medicine, psychology, and spirituality, focusing on the complex interplay between the human body, mind, identity, environment, and nature - central themes in her artistic practice ever since.

In her recent work, inspired by the Pacific Northwest, Shapiro continuously draws on environment and landscape, exploring the underlying relationships between various entities—earth, trees, water, sky, human beings and the cosmos. Working in the intersection of art, medicine and ecology, Shapiro reimagines the human form as a dynamic, interconnected landscape, thus posing questions about the boundaries between self and environment. By reconstructing the body with elements from nature, she reflects the exterior world through the interior body as landscape, and vice versa. The artist herself has stated how she, at one point, ‘started to blend the body with its surroundings, questioning and exploring the lines that separate the two.’

The term ‘interconnectivity’ is also often used to describe what lies at the very heart of Shapiro’s undeniably deeply personal and unified art practice, where the mutualism between stillness and motion is a hallmark of her work. Shapiro’s work, brought to life through her slow and meditative focus, is built on case studies, diagnostics, and x-ray vision as tools to investigate layers of meaning.

Shapiro has recently experienced something of a comeback on the international arena. Of great importance, obviously, was her inclusion in the 2024 group survey, Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (when the museum acquired one of her earlier pieces for its permanent collection). Other contributing factors have been the two 2024 solo exhibitions, Light Within Darkness and Diagnosing Disturbances, mounted by François Ghebaly in their gallery spaces in Los Angeles and New York. To this could also be added the aforementioned solo exhibition Interconnected Worlds at Axel Vervoordt, Antwerp, Belgium, in 2025.

Firestorm Foundation acquired Vulnerable at the 2024 exhibition Light Within Darkness atFrançois Ghebaly in Los Angeles, California. This solo exhibition brought together eighteen of Shapiro’s paintings executed in the period 1976 to 2023. The gallery described how these paintings tracked ‘the evolutions and continuities of Shapiro’s work’ whilst highlighting how Shapiro ‘reflects the environment through the inner worlds of her figures’ by ‘taking the body apart and reconstructing it with elements from nature.’ The press release ahead of the exhibition also pointed out how Shapiro’s work, ‘the product of many hours of repetitive and meditative focus’, ‘often bridges the microscopic and the macrocosmic’ and, finally, how:

Shapiro often depicts figures with nesting structures and a focus on certain anatomical elements. […] Elsewhere small figures are shown either pushing into a body or pulling against it. These both-and relationships highlight the idea of unity—the yin and yang not as oppositional forces but as complements to one another. In more recent work, Shapiro shifts her attention more overtly to the landscape, portraying trees, water, and celestial objects as bodies interrelating. […] “I want to do intimate paintings, slow art, vulnerable art,” Shapiro has stated. “I want to do the opposite of big and brash.” Light Within Darkness reveals an artist who has committed herself to the vulnerability of the body and the earth and to extending a particular sense of tenderness and care across her decades of painting and healing.

Provenance

François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., Light Within Darkness, 22 February-30 March 2024.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above).

Miscellaneous

Katy Donoghue, ‘Ann Leda Shapiro and Truly Hall at François Ghebaly’, online article in whitewall.art, 7 March 2024, illustrated in colour.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation