Ann Leda Shapiro: Diagnosing Disturbances

François Ghebaly New York is pleased to announce Ann Leda Shapiro’s exhibition Diagnosing Disturbances, her first solo show in New York City since the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. The exhibition coincides with the November opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Vital Signs: Artists and the Body,” which includes Shapiro’s Out of the Web (1976) as a new acquisition in their permanent collection.

For over five decades, Ann Leda Shapiro has maintained a practice that intertwines art, healing, and activism. Her newest exhibition, Diagnosing Disturbances, brings together watercolors on paper produced over the last thirty years. Expanding on groundwork laid at her Los Angeles exhibition earlier this year, Diagnosing Disturbances surveys foundational interests such as environment, care, resilience, and the somatic and spiritual connections between humans and the natural world. 

Ideas around interconnectivity are at the heart of Shapiro’s work, linking body and environment within a framework of science, psychology, and spirituality. A practitioner of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, she merges healing and art-making into a personal visual language. Her work is created through slow, meditative focus, and draws on case studies, diagnostics, and x-ray vision as tools to investigate layers of meaning. By reconstructing the body with elements from nature, she reflects the exterior world through the interior body as landscape, and vice-versa.

Completed between 1993 and 2023, the exhibition works address an environment and political climate in crisis. In Smoke 2 (2019), Tornado (2023), and Smoke from Wildfires (2023), Shapiro uses diagnostic vocabulary from traditional Chinese medicine to connect environmental dilemmas with internal psychological states, making reference to recent disastrous fires and storms in the American West. In Shriek II (2017), part of a series titled Cracked Psyche, she reacts to the 2016 presidential election and major incursions on women’s bodily autonomy. Inspired by 4,000 year-old Cycladic figurines, the work shows a body holding onto self in the midst of a voiceless scream.

Cycles of life become bookends to the issues explored in the exhibition. In her recent work, Shapiro focuses on landscape and relationships between various entities—trees, sky, water, and the cosmos. Nursery Log (2022) looks toward the forests of the Pacific Northwest where she lives, and where dead and felled trees serve as sites for new growth. A group of fledgling trees reach upwards as they draw sustenance, while a celestial body—both sun and moon—shines at the work’s center. Each becomes a poignant symbol for the simultaneity of death and regrowth, resilience in the face of chaos.

On Saturday, November 16th, Shapiro will speak about her work with François Ghebaly partner Gan Uyeda and curator and writer Kathryn Weir. Weir was previously Artistic Director of the Madre Museum of Contemporary Art in Naples, Italy, where Shapiro’s work was featured in 2023. Weir also co-curated Shapiro in the exhibition Green Snake: Women-centered ecologies (2023-2024), at the Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong. 

Ann Leda Shapiro (b. 1946, New York City) lives and works on Vashon Island, Washington. Recent solo and group exhibitions include the Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. She has shown extensively in university and community exhibition spaces, as well as in exhibitions at Banff Art Center, Banff; Frye Museum, Seattle; Manetti Shrem Museum, Davis; Seattle Art Museum; Autry Museum, Los Angeles; the Boulder Museum of Art; De Cordova Museum, Lincoln; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is the recipient of a MAC Fellowship from the McMillen Foundation, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and a Twining Humber Award. Her works are held in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Seattle Art Museum and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.