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Girl Looking
Cyclist
Ballerina
Tall thin Man
Beautiful Transition
In Drag 1
Dancining On The Bar
Two Drag Queens
Performer #2
My new series addresses the prevalence of sexual violence and its impact upon
women and children. This particular painting, "The Undertow" depicts a fearful child
with her reassuring mother, oblivious and/or in denial of the danger beneath their
feet (the phallus in the sand underfoot). The abuse series brings to the fore the
plight of the four-out-of-ten women and girls who will be victims of abuse and/or
rape in their lifetimes. While these paintings confront the viewer with this harsh
reality, they also beg the question:  What in the socialization of men generates so
many perpetrators? As a woman, a therapist and an artist, I encounter and work
with the victims of abuse on a daily basis and bear witness to its devastating
consequences.
Undertow
Heidi Russell Presents
Painter Caren Jo Shapiro
After
Drag 5
First Date
CAREN JO SHAPIRO

Caren Jo Shapiro’s psychological paintings grapple with the issues of sexuality,
gender, abuse, and objectification.
They explore the complex impact of denied female
experience and the damage caused by the inherent sexism that manipulates our world.
Shapiro’s work challenges the betrayal transmitted by billboards which plaster our visual
experience day in and day out with tantalizing, unattainable female images.

Born in Queens, New York, Shapiro received her Bachelor Degrees in Art and Psychology
and then went on to receive her Masters in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 1987.
During the following year, Shapiro lived in Amsterdam in a cold water flat and dedicated
herself to creating, showing, and selling her work. Upon returning to the states, she moved
to Manhattan and supported herself as a waiter while the scale of her art steadily increased.

After painting for over twenty years, in 2002, Shapiro returned to New York University for her
Masters in Social Work and subsequently for Post Graduate Training at The Women’s
Therapy Center Institute for a specialization in ‘a feminist approach to eating problems and
body image.’ Committed to societal and individual growth, Shapiro counsels women and
adolescent girls whom, like the subjects of her paintings and many of us, are excluded from
unattainable ideals female attractiveness.

In 2009 Shapiro exhibited at the Leslie Lohman Gallery in NYC, (featured in Leslie Lohman
Catalogue), the Art-rium Gallery in Melville, L.I. (featured in the Long Island Newsday), and
the Welles Gallery in Lenox, Mass. (received an honorable mention). In Shapiro’s current
body of work, the prevalence of rape and abuse is front and center. Shapiro’s paintings
raise the question of what in the ‘socialization of men’ turns so many into perpetrators: With
at least four in ten women and girls being abused, Shapiro’s paintings refuse to ignore the
fact that there are a lot of men out there doing the abusing!”

Shapiro currently paints in her Lower East Side studio and counsels, primarily women and
teens in her Lower East Side office, many with histories of trauma and abuse.
Contact Caren
here
Cjart@aol.com