American artist Nancy Spero, who died in Manhattan at the age of 83, was a woman of immense talent and courage who produced ambiguous works through a complex symbolic language drawn from Greek, Egyptian, Indian, and pagan mythologies, according to Hans-Ulrich Obrist in an e-flux article published on October 30th 2009.
Married to Leon Golub, whom
she met in the late 1940s as a student at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, she lived with him in Paris between 1959 and 1964, a period during
which she produced a series of works called the Black Paintings painted at
night and featuring androgynous figures and scrawled text fragments in sombre
colours over bright underlays. Spero's works then included fragments made of
collages which were to become her main art concept.
After returning to New York, she then she embarked on producing her War Series
between 1966 and 1970), which coincided with the Vietnam War, her works showing
bombs, bloodsheds and flying insects were being infused with deep political meanings
marking her condemnation of a somewhat useless military intervention.
Spero as much concerned by the consequences of conflicts and not only in the
field of war but also that of art and society as a whole, an attitude which she
notably reflected in the series of scroll works entitled Codex Artaud
that she prdoduced between 1971 and 1972. By that time, she had been
deeply involved in activist groups
militating in the New York art world after joining the Art Workers Coalition in
1968 and Women Artists in Revolution in 1969.
After she became a founding
member of the women-only cooperative gallery A.I.R. in SoHo, Spero presented in
1979 Notes in Time on Women, an encyclopaedic work in the form of a
210-foot-long scroll charting the status of women through historical time
showing figures of women, athletes throughout the centuries to denounce the
implicit and explicit misogyny in the canon of male European philosophers.
During the past 30 years, Spero exerted a powerful influence on younger
generations of artists while continuing to be highly prolific herself. She thus
continued to work with a profound sense of hope, despite having suffered the
loss of Leon Golub in 2004 and problems with her own health, and amid the
deepening of America's political crisis and international injustices. Spero's
art was suffused with this very human hope, which she saw as being grounded in
the intractability of human struggle. Her work was never crudely utopian—as she
told Hans Ulrich Obrist "utopia, like heaven, is kind of boring."
Beyond a body of pioneering and exceptional work spanning more than half a
century of tumultuous social change, this sense of hope will be her legacy. It
was an everyday hope that she lived and breathed, and a hope for today rather
than tomorrow: "I don't know about the future yet because everything is
subsumed in the present." She liked to quote Susan B. Anthony in saying,
"Failure is impossible."
After Hans Ulrich Obrist (e-flux)
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