In 1958, Schapiro was the first female artist to have a solo show at André Emmerich Gallery. Her Abstract Expressionist canvases of the 1950s are gestural and painterly yet also rooted in personal experience and her fascination with a vast range of visual culture, ranging from modernist masterpieces to tabloid photography. Even when invested in formal experimentation, Schapiro always imbued her canvases with content that had meaning to her. Typifying this idiom is Doll’s House (1959), a joyous abstraction in which loose figuration and the relationship between various forms suggest a domestic scene, reinforced by the appearance of gables, setting the tableau in an imagined home. The title hints at Schapiro’s varied interests—in essence, a dollhouse is a miniaturized fantasy of the home, much the same as Schapiro’s painted scene. The dollhouse, though, is also an element of women’s culture. Furthermore, the title alludes to Henrik Ibsen’s 1897 A Doll’s House, long embraced as a feminist play depicting a woman’s assertion of her own agency in abandoning her unfulfilling home life. Shifting attitudes about gender likely informed not only Schapiro’s invocation of the title but a broader appetite for the play, which NBC turned into a TV movie the same year as Schapiro created this painting.

Throughout her career, Schapiro experimented with increasingly explicit references to women’s experiences. In 1971, Schapiro and Judy Chicago founded the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts and conceived the legendary “Womanhouse'' installation. Having taken a break from her own studio practice during her involvement with the program, Schapiro’s work took a radical turn when she returned to painting in 1972. Curtains (1972) was Schapiro's first painting that incorporated fabric. The painting is made up of pink and blue washes with a sheer fabric covering the paint, with two lines running down the middle mimicking a zipper. Schapiro said of the work: “When I got back and looked at that picture I was absolutely horrified, horrified. I couldn't believe that I could make anything so corny. You'll have to take my word for that. And it frightened me." Schapiro remained committed to this new style of work that she termed “femmage,” to describe her process of collaging craft elements (traditionally gendered as female) into the “high art” of painting (historically the purview of male artists).

Additional highlights of the installation include Interview (1959), which demonstrates Schapiro’s use of press photography as source images for paintings. In this work, Schapiro was inspired by an image of the actress Gloria Swanson, along with Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. In the original photograph, the independence and extroverted pose of the actress is juxtaposed with the somber and contained personality of Mrs. Lindbergh, in her role as wife. Through shape and color, the gendered dynamics of the scene become externalized and reimagined. Shapiro creates a lively rhythm of colors—a steady parade of columnar forms abstracted from their legs: crossed and wound around the chairs. These are balanced by the more lyrical, gestural shapes of the circular basket on the lap of Mrs. Lindbergh.