A Journey with Nancy Spero
by Danielle Saltrese

Nancy Spero's demeanor resembles that of the acrobatic figures often featured in her work. Like the tightly compact women propelling themselves through a boundless whiteness, her firm body gestures with a similar propensity toward independence. At seventy-five years of age, Nancy's muscular frame houses a tenacious, though graceful, poise. She responds to questions as if picking up a long time argument- feisty and passionate.

In the early Paris Black Paintings (1959-66), severe tones darken the interwoven bodies of lovers while skeletal faces surface out of the miasma. Sometimes the connections between limbs are completely erased by blackness. Is this a depiction of intimacy, or the lack thereof? Spero discusses her erratic shift from these personal works of art to later, more politicized works. "I didn't want to do them anymore. I only did about three or four a year. I did them in the middle of the night and it got pretty distressing. They got darker and darker."

After a decade long hiatus abroad, in Paris and Florence, Nancy returned to her native country with the rising tide of the Vietnam War. "When I got back to the US, the Vietnam War on TV wasn't quite so monitored and censored. So I started thinking about war and destruction. I had three very young sons at the time and was concerned about their future. I actually tried to shift my art. I only worked on paper, which was so fragile, so ephemeral." She wanted to "manifest those kinds of things against the war and call them the war paintings and let this kind of important oral presentation go. Just leave it. That [criticism] was for the establishment to do."

In Male Bombs, a painting from her war series, Spero portrays aggression-both within the individual and within warring societies- as a male figure. Heads with scathing tongues spew from the mouth and the head of the penis. The configuration coalesces into the shape of a mushroom cloud. Conveying the gruesome ruthlessness of militaristic might. Spero says she did not at that point intend to feminize her art. Considering the content and the title of the piece, one wonders if she didn't unwittingly begin to probe violence in relation to the sexes.

Concerning her move toward political work Nancy says her "main goal was to have a dialogue with the world." She didn't exclude the microcosm of the art world in her thinking. Spero was highly involved in accruing attention for women artists. In the seventies she participated in a sit-in at the Whitney Museum, protesting the opening of a male dominated show. She is also a founding member of the first cooperative gallery for women artists, Artist in Residence or A.I.R., located on Wooster Street in Manhattan. The co-op still exists, although without Spero’s involvement.

Tackling the unacknowledged voice of women, Spero's style again shifted, incorporating female images borrowed from various magazines (including pornography), newspapers and books. Quite literally, Nancy cuts and pastes, reconfiguring their meaning, altering their physical appearance by photographing, and then reworking them with black and white acrylic fabric paint. The images are then sent to a plate maker. After Spero's studio receives the plates, miniature prints are made and filed in what has become known as her jewelry box. Dozens of drawers line her SOHO studio, with countless variations of each image made readily available.

In the case of the fertility figure, Sheela-na-ge, Nancy is generous and gives her breasts. Sheela has become a Spero signature icon. When asked why she decided to claim the Celtic creature, often patterning the icon into a chorus line of colors, Nancy points to Sheela's "incessant, persistent" impression. "I couldn't get rid of her in my mind. I tried to bring forth the mysterious." Nancy says Sheela became a symbol, if only because of the "ambiguity of the figure." Spero refers to the insidious, confrontational pose of the exhibitionist, as she reaches under her legs and opens her vulva to disclose a prominent black opening.

Literature on medieval figures is sparse and there is no certain meaning attributed to Sheela-na-ge. They are indigenous to churches, abbeys, and convents in Ireland and the north of England. While the emphasis on Sheela's reproductive organs infers she may have been viewed as part of a fertility rite, the period of the piece and its conspicuous illustration also suggest it might have been a tool in moral sermons in the warning against women's sinister lures.

Whatever Sheela's past, Spero has reasserted her, and now uses the figure's visual dominance in many installations and paintings. There is the Coffee Table Sheela-na-ge, which conjures up the image of a conversational cocktail piece, fingered between guest reaching for their cosmopolitans. There is also Hanging Sheela, clothes nonchalantly draped around a line of Sheelas. Spero proves feminists have a sense of humor.

One of the starkest images Spero incorporates in her work is a naked woman gagged and bound. It is an altered print of a photograph found in the pocket of a Gestapo member. Viewers are struck not only by the atrocity of this likely rape, but by the tragedy of the female victim's helplessness in a larger, societal context. As Spero still uses this picture today, her audience is confronted with the reality of unequal wages, sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence and the general mistreatment of women during contemporary times.

After three years, the seventy-five year old Nancy Spero, along with her studio assistants, recently completed an impressive mosaic in the Lincoln Center subway station in New York City. Try passing the one and nine stop first to see the swirl of bodies.