Nancy Spero: A Continuous Present

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.