Holly-Dale Shapiro

Holly-Dale Shapiro is a New York-based artist known for her multi-layered view of life. She creates images through meditations on image, language, and appropriation, building nonlinear narratives within landscapes, portraits, and other compositions.

An unconventional storyteller, Shapiro works with photographs pulled from books and magazines, deconstructing them before rebuilding them through collage and drawing. The results are works on paper — and, at times, other materials used as canvas and support — that hold together as both image and object.

Her research into composition and the re-conceptualization of the image, shaped by her background as a designer, drives her toward absurd, surreal encounters within the image — work that is often humorous and ironic, while also engaging political structures. Recently, she has begun incorporating AI into her practice, using it as a new tool for generating and manipulating imagery alongside her collage-based methods.

Paper is central to how Shapiro defines herself as an artist, especially at a moment when culture is moving steadily toward the paperless and the digital. Her commitment to paper as a medium is as much an archival act as an aesthetic one — a way of holding onto something material in a dematerializing world.