Fern Shaffer (born 1944) is an American painter, performance artist, lecturer and environmental advocate. Her work arose in conjunction with an emerging Ecofeminism movement that brought together environmentalism, feminist values and spirituality to address shared concern for the Earth and all forms of life. She first gained widespread recognition for a four-part, shamanistic performance cycle, created in collaboration with photographer Othello Anderson in 1985. Writer and critic Suzi Gablik praised their work for its rejection of the technocratic, rationalizing mindset of modernity, in favor of communion with magic, the mysterious and primordial, and the soul. Gablik featured Shaffer's Winter Solstice (1985) as the cover art for her influential book, The Reenchantment of Art, and wrote that the ritual opened "a lost sense of oneness with nature and an acute awareness of ecosystem" that offered "a possible basis for reharmonizing our out-of-balance relationship with nature."
Shaffer is also known for feminist and ecology-themed paintings that critics have described as romantic, dizzying and panoramic, spiritual, and capable of combining the scientific, personal and universal. She has been a long-time activist for women in art through her involvement and leadership at the Chicago alternative art space Artemisia Gallery and work with the national Women's Caucus for Art. In addition to exhibiting work throughout the U.S. and internationally, Shaffer has been active as an arts administrator, public lecturer, and educator.
Life
Born in Chicago, Shaffer studied art locally, earning a BFA from University of Illinois at Chicago in 1981. She followed with postgraduate work there and at Art Institute of Chicago, before earning an MA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College Chicago in 1991. In the early 1970s, Shaffer was part of a group of emerging women artists, including Barbara Blades, Carol Diehl, Elizabeth Langer and Sandra Perlow, who studied with painter Corey Postiglione at Evanston Art Center. Blades, Perlow and Shaffer would later be key contributors at Artemisia Gallery.
In the mid-1980s, Shaffer received increasing attention for her painting, and particularly, her performance rituals, with exhibits throughout the U.S. and in Colombia, Germany, Israel, Italy and the United Kingdom. Her work has been featured at institutions including Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago ("Art in Chicago: 1945–1995" survey), Portland Art Museum, Shedd Aquarium, and in solo shows at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, and Medellín Museum of Modern Art. Shaffer has received awards from the Andrea Frank Foundation (2000), Nancy H. Gray Foundation for Art in the Environment (1999), and International Friends of Transformative Art (1992).
In addition to her work as an artist, Shaffer has served on the advisory board of New Art Examiner, as Program Director of Humanitas Institute in Chicago, and as a chairwoman in that city's Department of Cultural Affairs. For the past 25 years, she has been Program Director at Selfhelp Home, a senior living community originally founded to help refugees and survivors of the Holocaust find community and rebuild their lives.
Work
Shaffer has worked in a wide range of media, including painting and drawing, sculpture, installation and performance, most frequently addressing themes of the body, gender, nature and ecology, and the intersections between them.
Painting
In her early work, Shaffer painted in a minimalist, abstract style influenced by artists such as Barnett Newman. Her first solo show, Ontology at 36 (1981), however, marked a shift that would continue, toward experimentation with mixed materials, representational elements such as the figure, landscape or symbolic imagery, and more emphatic themes. The "Morphogenic Fields" series (1983)—its title referencing the aura of radiation that emanates from living beings—features the female form, rendered in soul-baring, tenuous outline. Shaffer uses a shifting figure/ground relationship calling to mind the flow of energy in, out and through us, depicting women enveloped within fields of gestural DNA-like marks or packed with radiating color strokes like bursts of energy set against darker voids. Evoking both the personal and universal, these works address women's identity on the threshold of exploring, and perhaps realizing, the possibilities for fulfillment opened up by feminism.