Nancy Spero

NANCY SPERO (USA, 1926-2009)
"We Are Pro-Choice". 1992.
Silkscreen on japanese paper, copy A.P. 10/10.
Signed, dated and justified by hand in the lower margin.
Measurements: 42 x 66 cm; 58 x 82 cm (frame).

This silkscreen was conceived as a militant work, not only artistic, within the framework of feminist actions following Roe v. Wade and in response to the growing political pressures from conservative parties condemning abortion in the 1990s. Spero addressed human subjugation and abuses of power through her work, primarily from a feminist lens. The work features dynamic and empowered female figures that challenge traditional representations of women in art.

Nancy Spero was an American visual artist, a pioneer of feminist art and noted for her pacifist activism. Her artistic trajectory focused on breaking conventions, abandoning the canvas (considered an eminently masculine medium) to concentrate her efforts on paper, seeking a specifically feminine pictorial language. Over the course of five decades, her work captured her view of women and their historical relationship to oppression, torture, inequality, war and sexuality. In 1972, she co-founded A.I.R. Gallery (Artists in Residence) in New York's SoHo, the first gallery-cooperative of women artists in the United States. Her work is located midway between the literary and the pictorial.

Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1926, but grew up in Chicago. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 1949, where she met Leon Golub, whom she married in 1950. After graduating, she went on to study painting in Paris at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and at the Atelier de Andre Lhote. The couple settled in Chicago and, from 1956 to 1957, lived and painted in Italy, where Spero became intrigued by the format, style and mood of Etruscan and Roman frescoes and sarcophagi, which would influence her later work. Seeking a more varied and international environment, they moved to Paris from 1959 to 1964, during which time Spero held solo exhibitions and painted her Black Paintings series, which addressed subjects such as mothers and children, lovers, prostitutes, and hybrid forms.

Spero and Golub returned to New York in 1964, at the height of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. Affected by images of war and violence, Spero began her War Series (1966-70), small gouache and inks on paper that quickly depicted the obscenity and destruction of the conflict with phallic bombs and nuclear mushrooms, posing a harsh critique of the American political system. This decision to use paper was political, as it allowed him to break free from the constraints of the hierarchy of the art medium, "sticking his tongue out" at the status of the canvas.

Between 1969 and 1970, Spero distanced herself from the political-military debate to create her Artaud Paintings, works based on texts by the French poet Antonin Artaud, with whom she identified intensely through her own sense of being "silenced" and her awareness of pain and anger. These evolved into the vast Codex Artaud (1971-1972), composed of thirty-four rolls of pasted sheets, marking the mature stage of her work and a turning point in the art of the seventies. By uniting text and image, manually inscribed and often obscene, on long rolls of paper, Spero challenged the formal presentation and choice of medium valued in the art of her time, distancing herself from conceptual discourses.

Spero was a pioneering feminist activist, fighting against the underrepresentation of women artists in museums and galleries. She was a member of the Art Workers' Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution, participating in protests to demand parity. Her activism led her to become a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery in 1972.

During this period, her work shifted towards the representation of female figures, developing a visual vocabulary with images taken from ancient, medieval, modern art and advertising, including prehistoric Venuses, goddesses, athletes and war victims. Her intention was to transcend the male view of the female body, to break down its conception as the "other" and to demonstrate that women can be universal images. In 1974, she focused on women's issues and their representation in diverse cultures, highlighting works such as Torture in Chile (1974) and the long scroll Torture of Women (1976), which interweaves testimonies of government brutality against women with historical repression.

By developing a pictographic language of gestures and body movements, a "bodily hieroglyphic," Spero reconstructed the diversity of representations of women. The culmination of this work was seen in Notes in Time on Women (1976-79) and The First Language (1979-81), where she eschewed text altogether in favor of painted, printed and collaged figures, creating her "cast of characters" of women. International recognition came in 1987 with retrospective exhibitions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Beginning in 1988, she brought her printed images to the walls of museums and public spaces in her first wall installations, extending the picture plane of the scrolls and engaging in a dialogue with architectural space.

In the 1980s and 1990s, his work achieved critical acclaim and became more "exuberant and affirmative," expressing a kind of "utopia, of possibility for change." Nevertheless, he continued to address suffering and violence, as in Ballad of Marie Sanders (1991), which recovers a Bertolt Brecht poem about a tortured woman. His later works include Let the Priests Tremble... (1998) and Azur (2002), in which he uses color as skillfully as the text in the 1970s. In 2007, she denounced the U.S. government with the installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners at the Venice Biennale, a Maypole Tree with 200 bleeding aluminum heads that confronts the celebratory with the terrifying of the human war condition.

Nancy Spero died of heart failure in Manhattan on October 18, 2009. Her work is preserved by institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association in 2005.