Nancy spero artist biography

Nancy Spero

bio

Graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949, Nancy Spero (born:1926) and her husband, political painter Leon Golub, moved to Paris: an ex-patriot protest against the repressive Cold War political and cultural paranoia of McCarthyism.

In the mid 1960s, they returned to New York and a country at war. Spero said: “I started to think about how to address the war. I would do it in such a way as to show the collusion of sex and power, and I would do it in such a way as to shock the viewer.

I wanted to be obscene, because the war was obscene.” Also reacting to, and resenting the fact that women’s voices were being dismissed by the art world, she attacked the Vietnam War in a spirit of defiance—both against the sadistic obscenity of the male exercise of power and the rejection of women’s art production, establishing herself as one of the primary feminist artists of her generation.

In 1974, Spero produced a seminal feminist