Nancy Spero: Look Back at Gender
RECENT EXHIBITIONS 1996 Sheela Na Gig at Home, Jack Tilton Gallery / Black and The Red III, PPOW / A Cycle in Time, Sacred & Profane II, NY Kunsthalle Nancy Spero is an artist in whom I’ve had a strong interest of late. Her work is full of drama, poignancy, bitterness, and triumph. Many emotions and politics compete for the viewer’s attention, as do the image she employs in various designs and juxtapositions. It is difficult to face up to the accomplishments of her oeuvre as a whole—it is both comprehensive and indifferent to viewers; it does not cohere as does the work of Jasper Johns or Ellsworth Kelly, or even Louise Bourgeois. This incoherence, though partly intentional, is the primary obstacle to its comprehension. In the main, Spero’s intentions have been nothing if not grandiose: the formulation of a dramatic system pf female representation for the past (women wronged, scorned, justified, and emancipated). Hers is a work of the mind and the heart as much as it is of a