Nancy Spero

"For five years, from 1966-1970, I painted The War Series: Bombs and Helicopters. These works were intended as manifestos against our incursion into Vietnam, a personal attempt at exorcism. The bombs are phallic and nasty, exaggerated sexual representations of the penis: heads with tongues sticking out, violent depictions of the human (mostly male) body. The clouds of the bomb are filled with screaming heads vomiting poison onto the victims below, etc."
Nancy Spero, excerpted from The War Series 1966-1970, Charta.

American figurative artist, feminist and political activist Nancy Spero was born in 1926 in Cleveland. Solo exhibitions of her work were mounted regularly around the world from 1951 until the time of her death, at age 83, in 2009. Key solo exhibitions of her work were held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1992 and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 1988; a major traveling retrospective originated at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY in 1987. Spero's work was included in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. She often showed her work in two-person exhibitions with her husband, the respected painter and political activist Leon Golub, who died in 2004. In 2010, A Spero retrospective is planned for the Pompidou Center in Paris.

ACTIVE BACKLIST

NANCY SPERO: TORTURE OF WOMEN
Edited by Lisa Pearson. Text by Diana Nemiroff, Luisa Valenzuela, Elaine Scarry.
SIGLIO
ISBN: 9780979956225 | US $48.00
Pub Date: 4/30/2010
Active | In stock

NANCY SPERO
Text by Cristiana Perrella, Achille Bonito Oliva. Interview by Alessandra Mammí.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881587445 | US $24.95
Pub Date: 9/30/2009
Active | In stock

HANS ULRICH OBRIST & NANCY SPERO: THE CONVERSATION SERIES
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783865603227 | US $22.00
Pub Date: 3/1/2008
Active | In stock

NANCY SPERO: THE WAR SERIES 1966-1970
Essays by Leon Golub and Robert Storr.
CHARTA
ISBN: 9788881584574 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 2/2/2004
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

NANCY SPERO: A CONTINUOUS PRESENT
Essays by Ingebord Kähler, Dirk Luckow, Susanne Altmann and Deborah Frizell.
RICHTER VERLAG
ISBN: 9783933807816 | US $40.00
Pub Date: 7/2/2003
Out of print | Not available

NANCY SPERO & LEON GOLUB: NOTES IN TIME
Artwork by Leon Golub, Nancy Spero. Edited by Maurice Berger. Text by Jo Anna Isaak.
THE CENTER FOR ART, DESIGN AND VISUAL CULTURE
ISBN: 9780962456565 | US $20.00
Pub Date: 10/2/1995
Out of print | Not available

Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero (1926-2009) in her New York studio, 1973, reproduced in The War Series, published by Charta. An important figure in American postwar art, an influential feminist and an effective political activist, Spero influenced generations.

Nancy Spero: Torture of Women

Edited by Lisa Pearson. Text by Diana Nemiroff, Luisa Valenzuela, Elaine Scarry.
Published by Siglio

Torture of Women, Spero's epic, 14 panels, 125-foot-long collage work, fuses startling imagery from ancient mythology with hand-printed and typewritten first-person testimonies of abuse--from ancient times through the present. This unique volume zooms in, translating the work into nearly 100 pages of detailed, legible reproductions.

Nancy Spero

Text by Cristiana Perrella, Achille Bonito Oliva. Interview by Alessandra Mammí.
Published by Charta

After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fine Arts Academy of Paris, Nancy Spero distinguished herself as one of the most significant protagonists on the New York art scene, where she has lived and worked since 1964. Among the most prominent and
influential figures in American art today, she has always been involved in feminist and peace movements, and has elaborated a language of painting that is intimately tied to social and anthropological realities. This volume focuses on the artist's social commitments, as documented in photographs and an interview, and also includes recent works recording her path through art and politics. Thanks to important solo shows in public museums and at important venues such as the 2007 Venice Biennale curated by Robert Storr, which featured her work "Maypole: Take No Prisoners," and solo exhibitions in Spain, over the past few years Spero has conquered the European art scene.
Nancy Spero is an American-Jewish artist who works in many media, both traditional and experimental. Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1926. After attending the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1944-1945, she received her BA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949. Her first solo exhibit was in Paris in 1962.

Hans Ulrich Obrist & Nancy Spero: The Conversation Series

Vol.11

Published by Walther König, Köln

For more than half a century, the influential American artist and activist Nancy Spero has been known for her relentless honesty and her unshakable commitment to political, social and cultural causes--from women’s issues to war and other power conflicts. In this volume, she shares strong thoughts and light moments with series editor Hans Ulrist Obrist.

Nancy Spero: The War Series 1966-1970

Essays by Leon Golub and Robert Storr.
Published by Charta

Galvanized by the political events of the Vietnam War, Nancy Spero dedicated herself for five years to creating a group of gouache paintings on paper, titled The War Series. In these works, Spero not only expressed her rage at the violence and oppression of the war, but also introduced many of the images and themes that would continue to find their place in her work, and anticipated the post-modern aesthetic of fracture, dissonance, and collage. This volume is the first to analyze The War Series in depth, and its publication could not, unfortunately, be more timely.

Nancy Spero: A Continuous Present

Essays by Ingebord Kähler, Dirk Luckow, Susanne Altmann and Deborah Frizell.
Published by Richter Verlag

As early as the 1960s, Nancy Spero's work was breaking ranks with the establishment. Her unique pictorial vocabulary and insistent political engagement was a far cry--and a loud cry--from the styles of abstraction that dominated the American art world at that time. She articulated and has continued to drive at themes of burning interest to her: protest against the Vietnam War, the alienation of society and violence against women, for example against Jewish woman under National Socialism and in the historical contexts of witch hunts. A Continuous Present pairs her War Series (1966-70), a cycle of anti-Vietnam War gouaches, with an overview of her work from the last decade. Between 1992 and 2001, Spero created infinite-seeming works on long horizontal and vertical bands of paper--a format borrowed from Egyptian papyrus rolls, Chinese scroll painting and antique friezes--populating them with female figures taken from mythology, various epochs and diverse cultures, giving them feminist momentum via highly charged or parodistic confrontations.

Nancy Spero & Leon Golub: Notes In Time

Notes in Time

Artwork by Leon Golub, Nancy Spero. Edited by Maurice Berger. Text by Jo Anna Isaak.
Published by The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture