Nancy Spero at de Appel
From April 19 through June 22, to mark the release of Codex Spero. Nancy Spero Selected Writings and Interviews 1950-2008 compiled by curator Roel Arkesteijn, de Appel in Amsterdam is hosting a solo exhibition by the Season 4 artist.
At once an ‘artistic testament’ and ‘radical manifest,’ the monograph contains a selection of the artist’s texts, personal statements, notes and interviews. The exhibition Spero Speaks includes exemplary works from different phases of Nancy Spero’s distinguished career as artist, activist, feminist and mentor.
Codex Spero. Nancy Spero Selected Writings and Interviews 1950-2008 is published by de Appel in collaboration with Roma Publications. Since 1975, de Appel has functioned as a site for the research and presentation of contemporary visual art through exhibitions, publications and discursive events. De Appel also functions as a platform for performances by visual artists, choreographers and theatre makers.
Nancy Spero | Becoming an Artist
EXCLUSIVE: Photographs of Nancy Spero from the 1960s to 2000.
A pioneer of feminist art, Nancy Spero’s work since the 1960s is an unapologetic statement against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance. Executed with a raw intensity on paper and in ephemeral installations, her work often draws its imagery and subject matter from current and historical events such as the torture of women in Nicaragua, the Holocaust, and the atrocities of the Vietnam War.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Nancy Spero.
LEARN: Nancy Spero is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Protest of the Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Photos © Nancy Spero, courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Artwork courtesy: Nancy Spero. Thanks: Samm Kunce.>
Art:21 Wins Prestigious 2007 Peabody Award!
Season Four of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century has been honored with a George Foster Peabody Award - the premiere international prize in electronic media - in the 67th Annual Peabody Awards Competition.
The Art:21 series was recognized for providing “a unique forum for the display, analysis and appreciation of myriad forms of contemporary visual art” by the University of Georgia’s Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, which has administered the Peabody Award program since its inception in 1940. The Season Four episode Protest, featuring the contemporary artists Jenny Holzer, Alfredo Jaar, An-My Lê , and Nancy Spero, was singled out for its examination of the ways in which contemporary artists picture and question war, express outrage, and empathize with the suffering of others.
Selected from over 1,000 entries, Art:21 is the first visual art series to win a Peabody since 2002, and among only a handful of visual art programs to claim such an honor in the Peabody’s history. Art:21 is one of thirty-five recipients honored from the world of news, entertainment and radio, including such high profile programs as 60 Minutes, NOVA, Frontline, Planet Earth, Project Runway, The Colbert Report, 30 Rock, and Mad Men.
“The latest Peabody recipients reflect great diversity in content, genre and source of origination,” said Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards, at the announcement ceremony. “The Peabody Awards, in all their diverse and innovative examples, are models for what can and should be done across the board.” The Peabody Awards, the oldest honor in electronic media, recognizes distinguished achievement and meritorious public service.
The Peabody Awards will be presented on June 16 at a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Brian Williams, the distinguished anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, will be the master of ceremonies.
The Peabody Awards, the oldest honor in electronic media, recognizes distinguished achievement and meritorious public service; the awards do not recognize categories nor are there a set number of awards given each year. The Peabody Board is a 16-member group, comprised of television critics, broadcast and cable industry executives and experts in culture and the arts, that judges the entries. Winning entires become a permanent part of the Peabody Archive in the University of Georgia Libraries — one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most respected moving-image archives.
SAVE THE DATE!
A special screening of Protest, followed by a discussion with featured artist An-My Lê , will be held May 5, 6:30pm at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the The New York Public Library. This event is free and open to the public.
Nancy Spero Honored by NWHP
For March‚Äôs National Women’s History Month, the National Women‚Äôs History‚Äôs Project (NWHP) is honoring the achievements of twelve artists, including Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, and Season 4‚Äôs Nancy Spero.
Women’s Art: Women’s Vision, the theme this year, pays tribute to the originality and imagination of the creative impulse. The NWHP was founded in 1980 in Santa Rosa, California by Molly Murphy MacGregor, Mary Ruthsdotter, Maria Cuevas, Paula Hammett and Bette Morgan to broadcast women’s historical achievements. The NWHP started by leading a coalition that successfully lobbied Congress to designate March as National Women’s History Month. Today, the NWHP is known nationally as the only clearinghouse providing information and training in multicultural women’s history for educators, community organizations, parents, and for anyone wanting to expand their understanding of women contributions to U. S. history.
Nancy Spero is renowned for her politically-charged work as both artist and activist. She has shown in major solo and group exhibitions around the world for over forty years, and was a co-founder of A.I.R. (Artists In Residence) Gallery in New York City in 1972, the very first collective of women artists in the U.S.
For further information on the National Women’s History Project and the 2008 honorees, please visit the NHCP website.
Spotlight on Protest: Nancy Spero
Nancy Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1926. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1949), and honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1991) and Williams College (2001). Spero is a pioneer of feminist art. Her work since the 1960s is an unapologetic statement against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance. Executed with a raw intensity on paper and in ephemeral installations, her work often draws its imagery and subject matter from current and historical events such as the torture of women in Nicaragua, the extermination of Jews in the Holocaust, and the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Spero samples from a rich range of visual sources of women as protagonists, from Egyptian hieroglyphics, 17th Century French history painting, and Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie advertisements. Her figures, in full command of their bodies, co-existing in nonhierarchical compositions on monumental scrolls, visually reinforce principles of equality and tolerance. Spero was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2006). Awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association (2005); the Honor Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2003); the Hiroshima Art Prize (jointly with Leon Golub, 1996); and the Skowhegan Medal (1995). Major exhibitions include Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2003); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1994); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1994); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1992); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988). Spero lives and works in New York.
Watch a clip from Spero’s Art:21 segment:
About her work, Spero says,
“I guess maybe my art can be said to be a protest. I see things a certain way and as an artist, I’m privileged in that arena to protest or say publicly what I’m thinking about. Maybe the strongest work I’ve done is because it was done with indignation. Considering myself as a feminist, I don’t want my work to be a reaction to what male art might be or what art with a capital A would be. I just want it to be art. In a convoluted way, I am protesting; protesting the usual way art is looked at, being shoved into a period of category…[I]f people want to take something from it I’m thrilled because in a way that gets my message to the world.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 54).
Read more about Nancy Spero’s work and watch additional clips on her Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Spero’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view her segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Nancy Spero by leaving a comment below.
Art:21 Season 4 - PROTEST premieres Sunday, November 4 on PBS!
Season 2 Protest premieres Sunday, November 4, 2007 at 10 p.m.
Check local listings
How does contemporary art engage politics, inequality, and the many conflicts that besiege the world today? Episode 2 of Season 4 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century examines the ways in which four artists use their work to picture war, express outrage, and empathize with the suffering of others. Whether bearing witness to tragic events, presenting alternative histories, or engaging in activism, the artists interviewed in Protest use visual art as a means to provoke personal transformations and question social revolutions. Protest is shot on location in New York, New York; Hoosick Falls, New York; Wappingers Falls, New York; Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California; and Santiago, Chile.
about the artists
For decades, Nancy Spero has drawn from the political to create compelling works of art that make a statement against war, the abuse of power and our male-dominated society. Regarding her paintings made during the Vietnam War, Spero says: ‚”I guess maybe my art can be said to be a protest “The War” paintings are certainly a protest because it was done with indignation.” Spero further explains how the politically-inspired work of her late husband, Leon Golub, not only stimulated, but also posed a challenge for her own work. “It was pretty damned difficult contending with someone who was so brilliant,” she says. Viewers observe Spero as she creates a new work for the Venice Biennale.
Landscape photographer An-My Lê is fascinated by military war exercises. “I think my main goal is to try to photograph landscape in such a way so that history could be suggested through the landscape, whether industrial history or my personal history,” she says. Lê discusses her return to Vietnam, where she grew up amid the violence of the Vietnam War, to photograph people’s activities, revisit childhood memories, and reconnect with her homeland, as well as her experience photographing military re-enactors, whom she found on the Internet. Unable to travel to Iraq to document current U.S. incursions in the Middle East, Lê worked with marines training at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California.
“I strongly believe in the power of a single idea” says Alfredo Jaar. “My imagination starts working based on research, based on a real life event, most of the time a tragedy that I’m just starting to analyze, to reflect on - this real life event to which I’m trying to respond.” Through his work, Jaar explores both the public’s desensitization to images and the limits of art to represent events such as genocide. Art21 follows and films Jaar in his native Chile during a major retrospective of his work, which he shares for the first time with the Chilean public‚ a triumphant and moving homage in his homeland after leaving to live abroad shortly after the Pinochet regime’s military coup.
Jenny Holzer discusses the concepts behind some of her most well-known projects, including For 7 World Trade (2006), for which she projected text onto a glass wall of the lobby. Much of Holzer’s work focuses on devastation and cruelty, and uses the words of others. “I stopped writing my own text in 2001,” she explains. “I found that I couldn’t say enough adequately and so it was with great pleasure that I went to the text of others.” Viewers observe Holzer creating new work as she prepares an exhibition of paintings and prints of declassified, redacted government documents, some of which are letter-size, while others are blown-up to an overwhelming scale “in hopes that people will recoil,” she says.
Art Newspaper interview: “Nancy Spero? still angry in her 80s”
London’s The Art Newspaper recently published an interview with Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. The interview points out the important role that political, activist, and feminist activities play in Spero’s life and artwork, an artist “who has often been more acclaimed in Europe…than in her native country, where she remains almost a cult figure.”
In this interview, Spero, who is included in the 52th Venice Biennale (June 10 - November 21, 2007) with her installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners, explains the influence of the American political situation on her current and past body of work.
Read the entire interview here.
