Awards
2004 CWA Annual Recognition Awards
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) will honor two outstanding women—the visual artists Betye Saar and Nancy Spero—at its ninth annual Recognition Awards Ceremony at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel and Towers during the CAA Annual Conferenc. The ceremony takes place on Thursday, February 20, 2004, at 7:00 AM. Please join us in celebrating their amazing and continuing careers.
Betye Saar
Betye Saar (photograph by Robert Hale)
The internationally acclaimed artist Betye Saar, born and raised in Los Angeles, continues to intrigue and tantalize her audience with her strikingly provocative box art images. Her interest in design and printmaking and her pursuit of the fine arts emerged through certain events that transformed her way of working. One such occurrence took place during a visit to the Pasadena Art Museum in California (now the Norton Simon Museum) in 1966, where she saw the esoteric, complex box constructions of Joseph Cornell on display. Another opportunity for change emerged in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, as seen in her now-legendary box construction, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972).
Still another influence was motherhood and family. In an interview with curator Robert Barrett in the catalogue for her exhibition, Betye Saar: Secret Heart, at the Fresno Art Museum in California in 1993, Saar recalled, “My creative impulse to make art came after college. The stimulus to become an artist came primarily from my family experiences.” Her mother’s “interest in handcrafts—knitting, jewelry making, and sewing” also influenced her artistic vision. In those early years of watching her mother’s handiwork, she learned to interweave the aesthetic of fine art with the skill of craft.
Saar studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Pasadena City College as an undergraduate, with a concentration in design and printmaking. While attending Pasadena, she “was studying for a teaching credential to teach design in high school and junior college. They had … a strong printmaking department … [and she decided] to take printmaking classes. This experience was a bridge to fine arts.” She then pursued graduate coursework at California State University, Los Angeles.
Saar’s distinguished career and creative achievements span fifty years. Her work has appeared in many significant exhibitions, such as The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1990, and Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1977. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fresno Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem. Her box art pieces are in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, and Whitney Museum.
For Saar’s exceptional artistic achievements, her efforts to educate her audience visually, her dedication to artistic excellence, and her inspirational influence to her daughters, we honor her.
—Dori Lemeh, CWA member
Nancy Spero
Nancy Spero (photograph by Abe Frajndlich)
Nancy Spero’s career as an artist and activist demonstrates a continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. For nearly fifty years, her paintings have chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence and have articulated visions of ecstatic rebirth and possibility. This complex network of themes and concerns has driven her creation of a figurative lexicon representing women from prehistory to the present. Her pioneering epic-scale scrolls, first appearing in the early 1970s, and her mural-scale wall-painting installations, begun in the 1980s, lead the viewer through associations and metaphors, gestures and unearthly mutations, achieved by an array of collage, painting, and printmaking techniques. In these spaces lurk fractured visual and textual narratives brought into focus by an extraordinary time traveler, a scavenger of the first rank, who observes, apprehends, and critiques. Her unique and uncompromising work has been displayed in numerous museums and galleries internationally.
Spero’s legendary War Series (1966–70)—paintings on paper made in response to the Vietnam War—is among the most sustained and powerful group of works in the genre of history painting that condemns war and its consequences. The works depict defecating, phallic bombs, anthropomorphic helicopters pointing like forefingers to targets below, and mutant humans spewing paroxysms of death and chaos.
An antiwar activist and early feminist, Spero was a member of the Women Artists in Revolution (1969) and a cofounder of A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s cooperative gallery in New York (1972). She actively confronted sexism and racism in the exclusionary museum exhibition and collection policies of the time. Spero articulated these issues in panel discussions, letters, and pamphlets, and by participating in demonstrations at New York museums.
Nancy Spero, panel 19 of The First Language, 1981, painted collage and handprinting on paper, total size 20 in. x 190 ft. (artwork © Nancy Spero; photograph by David Reynolds)
By 1971, Spero had developed her pictographic language of gesture and motion in her signature scroll paintings on paper: Codex Artaud (1971–72), The Hours of the Night (1974), Torture of Women (1976), and Notes in Time on Women (1979). Although her collaged and painted scrolls (some more than 250 feet in length) were Homeric in both scope and depth, the artist shunned the grandiose in her content and style, relying instead on an intimacy and immediacy while also revealing a continuum of shocking political realities harnessed to enduring myths. The artist re-presented previously obscured women’s history, cultural mythology, and literary references with expressive figuration. Spero’s themes evolved from chronicling and interpreting the intersection of history and myth to depicting a unique representation of the extremes of human experience, from the horrific to the transcendent. Harnessing a capacious imaginative energy and a ferocious will, she mined the full range of power relations, unraveling the political as a manifestation of personal landscapes and exploring the psychotopography of individual memory and collective witness.
In 1987, following retrospective exhibitions in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada, Spero created images that leapt from the scroll surface to the wall itself, refiguring representational forms of women over time and engaging in a dialogue with architectural space. Her wall paintings in Chicago, Vienna, Dresden, Toronto, and Derry form poetic reconstructions of the diversity of representations of women from the ancient to the contemporary world, validating a subjectivity of female experience.
Her scrolls and murals become symbolic spaces that put women at the center of a universe in which their perceptions, actions, and choices matter. Spero’s work gives visual substance to women’s social and political concerns, to their emotional lives and their intellectual activities, offering alternative possibilities for being and imagining. Her art sings as an open-ended chorus of individual and collective voices.
As an artist-in-residence, lecturer, panelist, installation artist, and painter, Spero continues to be a significant influence on new generations of artists. Her work and activism have inspired many artists and opened doors for many more. The inseparability of art from life, aesthetics from humanity, and knowledge from action, are givens for her. Bringing lost history to life, Spero offers glimpses into the means of revisioning an interplay among the forces of the sensual—body in action, mythic archetypes reconfigured, and metaphysical yearnings grounded in the physical.
—Deborah Frizzell, CWA member
