Nancy Spero

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Nancy Spero (born 1926) is an American artist.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she is now based in New York City. She was married to artist Leon Golub (1922 - 2004).

As both an artist and activist, Nancy Spero’s career has spanned fifty years. Her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns is renowned. She has chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present in such epic-scale paintings and collage on paper as Torture of Women (1976), Notes in Time on Women (1979) and The First Language (1981).

1 Early biography
2 New York
3 Recent additions
4 Bibliography and sources
5 External links

[edit] Early biography

Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1926, but a year later her family moved to Chicago, where she grew up. After graduating from New Trier High School, she found her real milieu at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she graduated in 1949. Among Spero’s peers at the Art Institute was a young GI who had returned from service in World War II, Leon Golub. Spero continued after her graduation from the Art Institute to study painting in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Atelier of Andre Lhote, an early Cubist painter, teacher and critic. Soon after her return to the United States in 1950, she married the painter she had met while a student at the Art Institute, Leon Golub, and the two artists settled in Chicago.

From 1956 to 1957, Spero and Golub lived and painted in Italy, while raising their two sons. Spero and Golub were equally committed to exploring a modernist representation of the human form, its narratives and art historical resonances, even as Abstract Expressionism was becoming the dominant idiom. It was in Florence and Ischia that Spero became intrigued by the format, style and mood of Etruscan and Roman frescoes and tomb sarcophagi which would influence her later work. Finding a more varied, inclusive and international atmosphere in Europe than in the New York artworld at the time, Spero and her family moved to Paris, living there from 1959-1964. Spero’s third son was born in Paris, and the artist had major solo exhibitions in Paris at Galerie Breteau in 1962, 1964, and 1968. During this period, Spero painted a series entitled, Black Paintings, depicting mythic themes, such as mothers and children, lovers, prostitutes and hybrid, human-animal forms.

[edit] New York

Spero and Golub returned to New York in 1964, where the couple continued to live and work. On their return, the Vietnam War was raging and the Civil Rights Movement was exploding. Affected by images of the war broadcast nightly on television and the unrest and violence evident in the streets, Spero began her War Series (1966-70). These small gouache and inks on paper, executed rapidly, linked the obscenity and destruction of war. The War Series is among the most sustained and powerful group of works in the genre of history painting that condemns war and its real and lasting consequences.

An activist and early feminist, Spero was a member of the Art Workers Coalition (1968-69), Women Artists in Revolution (1969), and in 1972, she was a founding members of the first women’s cooperative gallery, A.I.R.(Artists in Residence) in SoHo. It was during this period that Spero completed her Artaud Paintings (1969-70), finding her artistic “voice” and developing her signature scroll paintings: Codex Artaud (1971-1972). Uniting text and image printed on long scrolls of paper, glued end-to-end and tacked on the walls of A.I.R., Spero violated the formal presentation, choice of valued medium and scale of framed paintings. Although her collaged and painted scrolls were Homeric in both scope and depth, the artist shunned the grandiose in content as well as style, relying instead on intimacy and immediacy, while also revealing the continuum of shocking political realities underlying enduring myths.

In 1974, Spero chose to focus on themes involving women and their representation in various cultures; her Torture in Chile (1974) and the lengthy scroll, Torture of Women (1976, 20 inches x 125 feet), interwove oral testimonies with images of women throughout history, linking the contemporary governmental brutality by Latin American dictatorships (from Amnesty International reports) with the historical repression of women. Spero re-presented previously obscured women’s histories, cultural mythology, and literary references with her expressive figuration.

Developing a pictographic language of body gestures and motion, a bodily hieroglyphics, Spero reconstructed the diversity of representations of women from pre-history to the present. From 1976 through 1979, she researched and worked on Notes in Time on Women, a 20 inch by 210 foot paper scroll. She elaborated and amplified this theme in The First Language (1979-81, 20 inches by 190 feet), eschewing text altogether in favor of an irregular rhythm of painted, hand-printed, and collaged figures, thus creating her “cast of characters.” The acknowledgement of Spero’s international status as a preeminent figurative and feminist artist was signaled in 1987 by her traveling retrospective exhibitions in the U.S. and U.K. By 1988, she developed her first wall installations. For these installations, Spero extended the picture plane of the scrolls by moving her printed images directly onto the walls of museums and public spaces.

Harnessing a capacious imaginative energy and a ferocious will, Spero continued to mine the full range of power relations. In 1987, following retrospective exhibitions in Great Britain, the United States and Canada, the artist created images that leapt from the scroll surface to the wall surface, refiguring representational forms of women over time and engaging in a dialogue with architectural space. Spero’s wall paintings in Chicago, Vienna, Dresden, Toronto, and Derry form poetic reconstructions of the diversity of representations of women from the ancient to the contemporary world, validating a subjectivity of female experience.

Spero has written: “I’ve always sought to express a tension in form and meaning in order to achieve a veracity. I have come to the conclusion that the art world has to join us, women artists, not we join it. When women are in leadership roles and gain rewards and recognition, then perhaps “we” (women and men) can all work together in art world actions.”

[edit] Recent additions

In 2006, Spero was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Spero was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery in 1971.

[edit] Bibliography and sources

Jon Bird and Lisa Tickner, Nancy Spero, exhib. cat. (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987);
Dominique Nahas, ed., Nancy Spero: Works Since 1950, exhib. cat. (Syracuse, New York: Everson Museum of Art, 1987);
Hanne Weskott, Nancy Spero in der Glyptothek, Arbeiten auf Papier, 1981-1991, exhib. cat. (Munich: Glyptothek am Koenigsplatz Muenchen, 1991);
Linda Julian, ed., Nancy Spero, 1993 Emrys Journal, exhib. cat. (Greenville, SC: Greenville County Museum of Art, 1993);
Susan Harris, Nancy Spero, exhib. cat. (Malmo: Malmo Konsthall, 1994);
Jon Bird, Jo Anna Isaak, and Sylvere Lotringer, Nancy Spero (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996);
Elizabeth A. Macgregor and Catherine de Zegher, Nancy Spero, exhib. cat., (Birmingham, U.K.: Ikon Gallery, 1998);
Nancy Spero: A Continuous Present, Exhibition Catalogue (Kiel, Germany: Kunsthalle zu Kiel and the University of Kiel, 2002);
Jon Bird, ed. Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith (London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2003);
Susan Harris, Nancy Spero: Weighing the Heart Against a Feather of Truth (Spain: Santiago de Compostela, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, 2005).