Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero (Cleveland, 1926 – New York, 2009) was an American visual artist and one of the pioneers of feminist art, alongside figures such as Martha Rosler and Adrian Piper. Her work, sitting somewhere between the literary and the pictorial, challenged the artistic conventions of her time through feminist and anti-war activism.

After training at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris with André Lhote, Spero began painting on canvas but judged that medium to be strongly male-coded, so she searched for her own language on paper. Her war series and her texts drawn from the poet Antonin Artaud led to the monumental Codex Artaud (1971-1972), made of scrolls of joined sheets. She then turned to women and their historical relationship with oppression, torture and violence, as in Torture of Women (1976), a long scroll weaving testimony and historical imagery.

In 1972 she co-founded A.I.R. Gallery in SoHo, the first cooperative gallery for women artists in the United States. Her legacy lies in pressing for women's presence in museums and galleries, and in a visual language that treats the female body as subject rather than as the "other".