Helicopter Victim, Astronaut, digital print (1968/2006).

Nancy Spero’s socially engaged work has had a powerful influence on a younger generation of artists. By the late 1960’s, she was bringing issues from the burgeoning feminist movement to the political art scene. She was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery in New York, the first artist-run gallery for female artists in the U.S., opened in 1972.

 Spero’s installations and works on paper communicate the expressivity of the female body. By drawing on myth, fantasy and legend her project turns the vulnerability of the feminine figure into empowering strength. Her depiction of suffering, a central theme in Spero’s early work, demonstrates how the body is a vehicle for the universal experiences of death and birth, sexual pleasure, desire, and transcendence.

The War Series, an extensive sequence of gouache paintings on paper that Spero worked on for five years between 1966 and 1970, expresses her anger at the violence of war and oppression. It is a direct product of Spero’s reaction to the Vietnam War. ‘My works are meant to be manifestos against our [the U.S.] incursion into Vietnam, a personal attempt at exorcism’. Phallic bombs, defecating helicopters and clouds filled with vomiting heads manifest the war as a physical experience while at the same time pointing to the denial of its consequences. The helicopter, hovering like a primeval bird or a monster, becomes the chief symbol of the war. The male body is depicted violently.

The Vietnamese women that were Spero’s work of the 1960’s reappear in the 1980’s, but the figures have become symbols of survival. In the continuous landscape of Spero’s white paper, they flee from dying bodies with children on their arms. They meet with other representations of women, and goddesses as well as offensive graffiti, pornographic imagery and mythical figures. Pointing to the way in which women are used, and when possible, resist, Spero has said of her recent work,  ‘I’m trying to depict a sense of the vitality of life, but also to pose the question: what does happen after the revolution? There have to be solutions and there aren’t a lot of them.’
(CNG)