Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Nancy Spero

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist Nancy Spero.

Last updated on November 8, 2024.

Nancy Spero was an American visual artist. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She married and collaborated with artist Leon Golub. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero had a career that spanned fifty years. She is known for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present in such epic-scale paintings and collage on paper as Torture of Women (1976), Notes in Time on Women (1979) and The First Language (1981). In 2010, Notes in Time was posthumously reanimated as a digital scroll in the online magazine Triple Canopy. Spero has had a number of retrospective exhibitions at major museums.

American - Artist | August 24, 1926 - October 18, 2009

Source: Wikipedia

When I showed ‘Black and the Red III’ in Malmö, Sweden, it was a continuum - a band - all around the galleryseeing this huge space in the gallery in Malmö, I just took a deep breath and I put the paper around in a single band. Then I continued along, printing on the wall like a trompe l’oeil to reiterate the images in the work printed on paper that I had push-pinned to the wall. I literally took the rhythm and the images from ‘Black and the Red III’ and continued that on the wall.

Nancy Spero

I've always sought to express a tension in form and meaning in order to achieve a veracity. I have come to the conclusion that the art world has to join us, women artists, not we join it. When women are in leadership roles and gain rewards and recognition, then perhaps 'we' (women and men) can all work together in art world actions.

Nancy Spero

An artist's job is to articulate what might otherwise be incoherent.

Nancy Spero

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 or category.

Nancy Spero

I never thought of my work in terms of being radical, although I tried to make it radical- that is, to shift the premise of what goes for pictures on a wall. I wanted my work to say something other than the usual- the usual format for an artwork being a rectangle, a square, or anything flat, framed, and attached or hooked on the wall. That was accepted practice, mainline thinking.

Nancy Spero

I suppose I felt doomed to be an artist early on because of the way I drew all over the books that I needed for school, from ancient history to math. I was more interested in drawing in the margins than actually doing the work.

Nancy Spero

Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Nancy Spero

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