1941 -

He was born in New York, son of a doctor and a microbiologist. He studied at New York University, at first with the intention of becoming a doctor. However, after spending two years with the Peace Corps in India (1965-67) he decided on a career in art, taking a studio in New York and returning to the university for an MA course. Early on he was impressed by the minimalism of Robert Smithson. In his first one-man shows he arranged simplified wooden and bronze forms, based on such everyday objects as shelves, ladders, houses, chairs and coffins. From the mid-1970s his work, though still consisting of simple rectilinear forms, began to reference the human body and to play with the sense of balance and precariousness. From around 1997/8 similar configurations take on a more architectural dimension, and in 2004 he exhibited at the L.A.Louver Gallery in New York a piece entitled 4 Elements, where the minimalist forms appeared to be floating freely in space. By this time he was already working on Verge, an ambitious project involving suspended forms, for a London office building. Shapiro has been commissioned to do work for the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, and has regularly shown work at the Biennial exhibitions of the Whitney Museum in New York.