Mira Schor: Figures of Speech

Walk in. The first thing you see is a moody painting the size of a wall: a smoldering orange orb suspended in a sky the color of deep, murky water, dark earth below. Look closer. You’ll notice a tiny, red horizontal human figure, barely visible, buried under the soil.

Keep going. Ghost-like human figures shrouded in thin, translucent rice paper painted in transparent washes of red, orange, and yellow. The colors recall flesh, blood, plasma. They slip, spirit-like, out of a body when it’s passing into the next life.

And then: masks of human faces, individual identity erased. Some with orange question marks for eyes.

Layered on top of these astral bodies and rudderless heads are speech bubbles, rendered in black ink. They cover the eyes, mouths, hearts, and ovaries. Words come out of an ear or an eye. Words like equality, equity, female, privilege, tribal, sex, opioids, and queer. Sometimes the faces are so covered, they suffocate.

These are words the current administration has banned from federal government documents — [you can find the full list at PEN America].

Without words to fight, express, and explain, we’d all be ghosts. Transparent.

Mira Schor (b. New York City, 1950) lives and works between New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. The daughter of Polish Jewish artists who fled Hitler's Europe, she has spent her career asking what words can carry — and what happens when they're taken away. In the 1970s, she participated in the CalArts Feminist Art Program and the landmark Womanhouse with Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. A painter who is also the author of several books, Schor uses scripted words as material, something intimate, embodied, and political. Her latest show at Lyles & King spans four decades: works from 1985-86 alongside new work from 2025-26.