Although Schapiro’s early work had touched upon feminist themes, her defining breakthrough came in 1972 when she, Judy Chicago, and twenty-one of their students from the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts created the installation Womanhouse. Contained in an abandoned Hollywood mansion, Womanhouse used icons of domestic work to explore the forms, processes, and history of gender construction, thereby linking women’s cultural heritage with progressive feminist expression. In subsequent years, Schapiro has developed this link into a visual language that seeks to recover and elevate the work of women artisans of the past; by employing decorative conventions found in quilting, embroidery, and appliqué, her art brings these historically trivialized modes of women’s expression into the realm of high art. To describe her artworks, as well as the activities they reference, she uses the term “femmage,” a word she invented to suggest a continuity between high art collage, which Picasso and Braque are typically credited with inventing, and works created by anonymous women, centuries before Still-life with Chair-Caning (1912).

Since the 1990s, Schapio’s works have incorporated figurative elements; the femininity alluded to in her abstract works has become personified and emerged from within “femmaged” patterns as exuberant, dancing women. One such piece, Pas de Deux (1986), has been translated by the artist into a thirty-five foot sculpture in Rosslyn, Virginia, titled Anna and David (1987). Schapiro currently lives and works in New York.