Joel Shapiro

Joel Elias Shapiro (September 27, 1941 – June 14, 2025) was an American sculptor. Classified by art critics as a Postminimalist, his works consisted of sculptures composed of simple rectangular shapes. His sculptures were mostly defined through the materials used, without allusions to subjects outside of the works. His works are in major collections and public spaces in the United Space and abroad. Most of his creations are named Untitled. His 1993 Loss and Regeneration was created for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Shapiro was born on September 27, 1941, in New York City and grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, New York. His father, Joseph Shapiro, was a physician who had an office in the basement of their house, and his mother, Anna née Lewis, was a microbiologist; both had studied at New York University. He grew up with a sister, Joan. His mother was a hobby artist who made clay figures. Growing up, he felt a love of art but a call to follow his father in medicine.

Shapiro graduated from Bayside High School in Bayside, New York in 1959, at which time the school’s yearbook awarded him the title of Man About Town. He received a B.A. in 1964. At age 22, he lived in India for two years while in the Peace Corps. He said about the time: it "heightened my sense of the hugeness and variety of life in general, but also, the possibility of actually becoming an artist became very real to me for the first time". He received an M.A. in 1969 from New York University.

Shapiro worked at the Jewish Museum, helping with exhibition installation and polishing silver objects of the collection. In 1969, he was featured in an exhibition of the Whitney Museum titled Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, which formalized the Post-Minimalist art movement. He had his first solo exhibition in 1970 at the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo. There, he also showed tiny houses and chairs in cast iron and bronze, commenting in 2007: "I think they insisted on their own obdurate sense of self, in spite of the space surrounding but at the same time they're a part of it". The small objects surprised on the background of the "monumentality of Minimalism", and the forms compared to the mostly abstract sculpture at the time. Shapiro's works were exhibited in the first exhibition of the Clocktower Gallery in 1973, which became the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

A retrospective of his work was held at the Whitney Museum in 1982. In 1992, Shapiro moved to the Pace Gallery. He had many solo exhibitions, in New York City, the United States and abroad.

In 2001, the Metropolitan Museum of Art installed 5 of his large bronze and painted aluminum sculptures in the Museum's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden.

Shapiro lived and worked in New York City. Around the time of his first exhibition, he married the art educator Amy Snider, who founded a department for education in art and design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. The couple had a daughter, Ivy, who became an art adviser. They separated in 1972, and Amy died in 2019. Shapiro married the artist Ellen Phelan in 1978. They lived in Long Island City where they had a spacious studio in a former electric substation.

Shapiro died of acute myeloid leukemia at a hospital in Manhattan, New York City, on June 14, 2025, at the age of 83.