Awards
2005 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Nancy Spero
Nancy Spero in 2003 (photograph by Abe Frajndlich)
The Distinguished Artist Award Committee for 2005 honors Nancy Spero for a lifetime of achievement. She has made a major contribution as a painter of powerful and haunting images, and she has contributed to contemporary art’s revitalization through content, purpose, and instrumentality. In her work and life, Spero has relentlessly championed freedom and the rights of the oppressed.
Spero’s distinguished career spans over fifty years, from her first group exhibition at the Salon des Indépendents, Paris, in 1950 to solo exhibitions in 2004 at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and in 2003 at Galerie Lelong, New York. Also in 2003 she created a wall installation as the American representative at the International Cairo Biennial. Her extensive exhibition record includes major museums worldwide; her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Australian National Gallery; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Centro Cultural, Mexico City; Harvard University Art Museums; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; the Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi, Vietnam; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Uffizi Gallery, Florence; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, to list only a few. Her career and influence are truly global.
She has been the recipient of important awards and honors, including a Hiroshima Art Prize from the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art and Hiroshima City, Japan, 1996; a Skowhegan Medal for Works on Paper, 1995; a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1977–78; and a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS Fellowship, 1976–77.
Nancy Spero, Sky Goddess/le Génie de la Patrie, 1996, hand printing and printed collage on paper, 24½ x 39 in. (artwork © Nancy Spero)
Spero’s nominator, Robert Berlind, perfectly described Spero in his letter to the committee: “She is an indispensable artist.” He also wrote eloquently of her unique vision and her important historical place: “The work of any number of younger artists, male and female, would simply not exist without her groundbreaking efforts. At a time when aggressive, large-scale Abstract Expressionist painting held sway, she painted dark, haunted images of lovers. During the 1960s, when various formalist and Pop attitudes prevailed, she made tendentious, engaged work protesting the Vietnam War and the condition of women. Her “Codex Artaud” series made common cause with that radically outside poet/artist and introduced written and spoken language as a central element in her art. Her “Torture of Women” series confronted the cool, cerebral art discourse of the 1970s with chilling historical accounts. By the 1980s her scrolls and installations bloomed into a celebratory parade of female images, at once fierce and gorgeous.”
Spero and her late husband, Leon Golub, have been important citizens of the international art world, both as artists and activists, and as mentors and role models to several generations of artists. She was a founder of the women’s cooperative gallery A.I.R. in New York. In the areas of politics and conscience, from feminism to AIDS, as well as the use of text and installation, artists continue to build on ground she bravely cleared.
Spero has created a powerful and pioneering body of work. We remain indebted to her uncompromising vision. Her art stands as a beacon for the humanist values of peace and equality. Spero is truly an indispensable artist; she elevates the world and the discipline of art with her dignity.
Committee: Richard Roth, Virginia Commonwealth University, chair; Hearne Pardee, University of California, Davis; Buzz Spector, Cornell University; and Georgia Strange, Indiana University, Bloomington.
